Maiko Month 2013
by hell-whim
Summary: Collected mini-fics/drabbles for Maiko Month 2013. Ratings and warnings with change with each chapter.
1. Modern

**Prompt:** Modern

**Rating:** M

**Warnings:** Institutional abuse, suicide, self-harm, assault, ableism, depression & anxiety triggers, implied child abuse

**Word Count:** 7880

**Notes:** Inspired by a recent lecture/discussion of institutional practices and abuses in the 1940s/50s/60s, consider this ATLA meets _One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest_.

**Modern**

"So what're you in for?"

She holds the cigarette out until he realizes that she's asking for a light. It's cold up here on the roof, and he has to snap a few times before flame licks up between his fingertips.

"Where'd you get those?"

"Orderly named Jee. He can get us anything that's banned or absent from the shop. _Especially_ if it's banned."

She's wearing the same white tunic and white trousers as him, but it looks better on her, wrapped and tied in a neat bow at her hip, loose sleeves sliding down to her elbows. She's pulled a hood up over her hair, and the edges frame her pointed face and straight black bangs.

"You never talk in group," he says. "I mean, I've never heard you talk on the ward."

"That's why _I_'m here," she shrugs, pulling her knees up to her chest. It's started snowing a little, and she scoots closer to him. "But we were talking about you."

She takes another quick drag, meeting his bewildered stare with steady eyes, blowing the smoke in a tight stream from the corner of her mouth.

"Is it because of your face?" she asks. "Did you do that to yourself?"

With one hand, he can almost cover the scar.

"I knew someone who did that," she continues, in that same flat tone. "She used to be on the ward, but I knew her on the outside, too. Song. Her boyfriend was firebender, and when he left, she started playing with matches. Burnt up her whole leg. That happen to you?"

He shakes his head.

"You don't talk in group either," she says, stubbing out the cigarette.

"My dad did this."

"Yeah?"

"I was little. He was fighting with my mom. I got between them. Thought I could stop him with my bending, but I was wrong. He did this to teach me a lesson."

"Can you see?"

"Yeah."

She nods, setting her chin between her knees and turning forward. The compound spreads out beneath them, spotlights winking through the blurry dark.

"Orange is such an awful color," she says with a kind of final certainty. He looks at her and can't help smiling a little.

"I tried to burn my dad's house down. I mean, I _did_ burn it down. Mostly. I think the foundation's still there."

Her head turns slowly, pivoting on the point of her chin, her eyes wide open and neutral.

"I ran away a few years ago. I was living this guy, this friend. Found out he—my dad—was doing stuff to my little sister. So I went back and burned down his house."

"What happened to your sister?"

"She went to live with her friend. She's got a million sisters."

"So you'll get out on parole?"

He shrugs. His eyes dart down to her lips and then back up. She smirks.

"I dunno. Maybe."

"Do you want to kiss me?"

"Do _you_ want to kiss_ me_?"

She shrugs.

"I'm Mai."

"Zuko."

She nods.

"We're strangers inside," she says, and then leans forward and presses her lips very softly against his.

o.o.o.o.o

He watches the other kids, just to be sure Mai wasn't lying, but one by one, they head up to the nurses' station during Jee's shift and return with hands bundled up in their sleeves, with faces turned down to hide satisfied smiles.

The money's hidden in a sock at the bottom of his private, locked drawer, but Zuko waits until his roommate's cleared out before counting it. Mom's new old boyfriend Ikem has a pill problem, and of the twenty she'd scrounged together for him, only six gold and a handful of copper remain. Zuko folds a pocket into his tunic and pins the money there with a bent paperclip he'd stolen from the craft closet.

He feels watched approaching the desk, but most people are huddled around the TV, and the few other stragglers keep their heads down. This must be another unspoken agreement, like how no one talks first in group or puts a serious suggestion in the box.

Up close, Jee doesn't look as old as Zuko had thought. His hair is uniformly grey and bristled, but there are just a few lines around his mouth and at the corner of each eye.

"Hey, kid," he says. "You need something?"

When Zuko doesn't speak, Jee finally looks up from his charts.

"S-someone told me..."

Jee nods and reaches for a box beneath the desk.

"Point to whatever you need."

Zuko presses right up against the plexiglass separator, fingering the hidden coins.

"What if I don't have enough?"

"You've got enough, kid."

Zuko points to the cigarettes, the pack embellished on the outside with a leering blue mask. Jee nods, and gestures over to the pill window.

It's dim in this hall—pill time is dinner time, almost two hours ago. Zuko passes over two gold pieces, and Jee passes the pack, one gold piece, and seven silvers.

"You're Ozai's kid, aren't you?"

"What's it to you?" Zuko snaps, and his throat tightens up.

"Nothing," Jee shrugs. "I just knew him."

o.o.o.o.o

At dinner a week in, he finds a message carved into his mango slices. Mai is waiting for him on the roof, wrapped in a blanket stolen from someone else's room.

"I heard a rumor firebenders run a little warmer than the rest of us."

"We're not big fans of the cold."

She fits on his lap, tucking up beneath his chin, spindle-thin arms sliding around his back. They share a few cigarettes, and her mouth tastes like warm smoke when they kiss.

o.o.o.o.o

Mid-month he runs out of money, so he finally writes to Mom and Azula. Uncle is the one to write back, and the one to show up for the big stupid visitors' day.

"I should've taken you out of that house years ago," he sighs, and he looks a lot older than Zuko remembers, less a jolly tea-drinking prankster and more an exhausted old man.

"Who says I would've gone with you?" Zuko mutters, slouching.

Across the room he sees Mai hiding inside her hood again, sitting sideways on the chair, knees to her chest, everything covered but her eyes. There's an older man at her table who looks a little like her, with a baby and a woman who's too young to be Mai's mother.

"I know a judge in the system," Iroh says, ignoring the question like he'd never heard it. "I'm trying to see if they'll grant me guardianship. You could come live with me and Lu Ten. You and Azula."

He blinks and looks back.

"Would you like that, Zuko?"

A few days later, Uncle sends some money, and Zuko's roommate hangs himself during breakfast. The orderlies take away everyone's belts, and in protest, most refuse to wear pants. All the sheets get replaced as well, with scraps of easily-torn fabric. Zuko rolls over in the night and wakes with just fistfuls of fiber.

"We want you to stay safe," Joo Dee says during group, smiling way too wide for her narrow face. "All of us here, from the doctors to the nurses to the orderlies, are committed to your health and well-being. Now, would anyone like to start?"

"Where's the suggestion box?" someone says, to a round of nasty laughter. Joo Dee's cheeriness dims a little, her smile tightening.

"It has become clear to me that a few _miscreant_ residents have been trying to interrupt our sense of community. Until such time as those residents step forward and apologize, I'm afraid there _will not be_ a place for the shy among you to anonymously raise concerns."

"I bet it was the new kid."

"I can't even write," snaps the new kid, a young girl of maybe twelve or thirteen. She's short and stout and loud—not broken, like the rest of them, but just blind and unmanageable. She sits with her knees apart and feet firm to the ground, bent forward like this whole thing makes her sick.

"Now, now, no accusations," Joo Dee grins. "I'm certain whomever wrote those _rude_ things is very sorry about it."

"No, we're not," Zuko mutters, and Mai laughs.

o.o.o.o.o

He'd already figured out how to palm the suppressors on the first day, and now keeps his supply stashed in the broken vent in his room. They haven't given him a new roommate yet, only stripped the bed and pushed the frame against the wall.

In small doses, the suppressor just tingles, and some of the kids get high off it, so when he runs out of Uncle's money, Zuko starts selling. He has his own needs, after all.

It's a steady business, made easy by how bad the observation is. Most of the orderlies make half a round every hour, but the rest of their shift is spent behind the desk and plexiglass, watching TV or reading old magazines. They'll break up a fight, but mostly they just let the ward sort itself out.

People seem to stick to their diagnoses. Like Mai said, they're strangers inside—she floats between the dark cloud of depressives and the serenity of the catatonics. The worriers usually hog the couch and the TV. The twitchers and pacers work the pai sho boards and the craft table and all the empty space in between. No one else here is an arsonist or a rager—though he's heard rumors about some delusionals hiding down the hall—so Zuko climbs onto one of the deep window wells, above a radiator, and reads.

Lu Ten's sent along some old pulp historicals—stupid gory action junk, but better than what's always on the news. Zuko only looks up when someone punches him in the arm.

"What the—"

"It's how I show affection," says the new kid, shrugging, climbing up and wedging herself between Zuko and the wall. "I'm tough."

"So what? You think I'm weak?"

"No, _Toph_. I'm Toph. My name."

Zuko blinks.

"Oh."

"I heard about you. On the radio."

"Yeah? What'd you hear?"

"That you're a firebender."

"Are you?"

Toph shakes her head and feels along the window bars until she's found one shielded by Zuko's knee. As he watches, her tiny fingers trace around the thickest part and then pull forward in a tight fist. Without turning away from the book, he reaches down as well, feeling where the metal has bowed.

"That's new."

"Useful," Toph shrugs. "So. You got any friends in here?"

He glances over to Mai, just now stepping over the prone form of one depressive, probably on her way to melt in with the catatonics. She doesn't notice his gaze.

"Yeah," says Zuko.

o.o.o.o.o

When Mai suggests sex, it's more a demand than a request—not that Zuko's going to complain. He's still a virgin with girls and not one hundred percent on what goes where, but Mai doesn't mind playing teacher.

The roof's way too cold now, so she leaves instructions in his papaya, a crudely carved map to an empty room at the end of the twitchers' hall.

"They never walk all the way down here," Mai says, stuffing some rags under the door. "Still have to be quiet, though."

There's no light in the room, but he still blushes as she unwinds her tunic and he lies back on the mattress they'd pulled to the floor. She brings his hands to her breasts, and when she shivers, he flares a little heat into each palm. She bites her lip and leans into his touch.

It's over a lot sooner than he thought it would be—she doesn't ask a lot of questions but somehow knows, soft hands working him to hardness, her mouth warm and wet across his bare chest. Instinct drives his participation, but he doesn't have to do all that much. Mai grins at him and then sinks down slow, silencing his groan with both hands over his mouth. At first they're touching only as much as necessary, but then she tips forward, sets her hands on either side of his head and kisses him.

She seems almost desperate to keep him inside, just rolling her hips back and forth, and his hands drift up from her sides across her back to her shoulders and he pulls her close, close as they can get, skin-to-skin. She hums and moans and even though he comes first, she guides one of his hands down to her core, whispers breathy little encouragements until at last she collapses and rolls off and pushes up right against his arm.

"If you make me pregnant, I might get out of here," she says, and starts to laugh softly when he chokes.

o.o.o.o.o

He doesn't really understand why no one else has found the roof. There's a part of the wall in the craft closet that isn't really a wall—no handle, no lock, just hinges that swing forward and a thin metal staircase. No fence or net, either, just a flat open space and a little retaining wall to sit on and dangle his feet over.

The snow sticks this time, so Mai walks in his footprints.

"You're another lifer, aren't you?" she says.

"Another?"

"Like me. Indefinite hold. Danger to puppies, children, and trash cans alike."

"Are _you_ dangerous?"

"To myself," Mai says, shrugging. "But my only ticket out is death or dismemberment."

She flicks the ash away, into the darkness, and passes the cigarette over. Zuko pulls in a good lungful before speaking.

"Why _are_ you here?" he asks.

"I don't talk," she says quietly. "I was always quiet as a kid, but after Mom died and Dad jumped on Meng and Tom-Tom was born, I guess the silence just got too much for him. I mean, I don't even have anything to say."

"So he put you in here?"

"With all the fucking psychos," Mai sighs. She finishes the cigarette, and Zuko lights another.

"Well," he says. "There's always pregnant."

"No," Mai says, shaking her head. "That won't work. I saw one of them coming in yesterday. I'd just move down a floor."

She smiles, hand running through his hair.

"Though we can keep up the effort. I'll just be careful."

o.o.o.o.o

Quarterly evaluations come around at the end of the month. The doctors move in a mass through the ward, silent, inspecting. The head of the department has a cruel frown, big ears, bald pate.

"I heard someone call him the Secretariat," Toph whispers to Zuko during craft time. Joo Dee always tries to set her up with paint and an easel, which Toph always ignores. "I don't like his walk. It's sharp, like a military march."

One by one they are lead away and stay gone for an hour each, all of them returning tense and quiet. Zuko and Toph will be the last, as the newest—they sit together on a bench near the pill window, both too scared to talk.

When his name is called, Zuko stands and shuffles into a room with one chair facing the doctors, who are arranged behind a long table.

"And how are you this afternoon?" the Secretariat asks. His voice matches his face and mustache: thin and oily.

Zuko says nothing.

"I understand this can all be quite intimidating, but we're just here to talk. To see how you're doing."

"Fine," Zuko says, crossing his arms.

The rest of his evaluation goes okay. A doctor on the end—who Zuko has never seen before this day—stands and describes Zuko's progress in group and craft and individual sessions he's never attended. He hears the words _right track_ and _general improvement_ and _good afternoon_ and then he stands, dismissed, and shuffles back out.

There's no message in tonight's fruit, but he heads up to the roof anyway. The snow's enough to risk a little flame, but only away from the roof's edge, huddled down by the door.

Mai burns through her pack in minutes and then starts on his, but it still takes him a second to realize she's not shaking from the cold.

"How bad was it?" he asks, and she doesn't answer, burrowing into his arms.

o.o.o.o.o

She tries to say it gently.

"Three weeks?"

"Sometimes four or five," she says, nodding. "They don't have the equipment here. They have to take me into the city."

There's an odd sort of buzzing in his ears.

"I don't really understand how it works," she says. "But when I come back, I won't be the same. I'm always...foggy. The first few days. It's hard to focus on things. And I forget."

"Forget?"

"Silly things. Like what time it is, or what's happening. Places I've been recently. New things, mostly."

"People?"

Mai looks down at her drawing—Toph seceded her usual place, sensing the need, and went to distract Joo Dee with irritation.

"I lose months, sometimes," Mai says. "Weeks, if I'm lucky."

For the past hour, he's been sketching her eyes, and he scrapes a little charcoal away, blurring the thin lines of her lashes.

o.o.o.o.o

The day they come for her, frost has blocked all the windows. They like to take people during meals—Mai wasn't given a tray, just lead to sit down at a table where she wrapped her arms around her middle and held perfectly still.

Two men in white suits and hats arrive—they could almost be part of the ward, save for their black rubber boots which track melting snow across the floor.

"It is time, Mai," Joo Dee sing-songs, and as she swoops down, Mai lashes out.

"No! I'm not going!"

With nails and teeth and hands and knees, she fights, spitting, kicking, clawing, screaming.

"Hey, get off! Get away from her!"

Blood boils in his stomach—Zuko stands and singes the floor with two fireballs—Mai is breaking free, running for him, when one of the men crashes down on her. Everyone else is screaming now, food trays scattered and forgotten, and the nurses' station empties as the air explodes with water and fire.

Mai's voice has broken around painful sobs, and Zuko's vision blurs, his throat constricting, and he's crying, too, trying to reach her, but one of the nurses is holding a needle and pulls down the waist of Mai's pants.

Two powerful arms close around him from behind, locking across his chest.

"Stop," Jee hisses into his ear. "Stop it, or they'll take you, too."

Zuko goes limp, gasping for breath, as he sees Mai rolled onto a stretcher and carried away.

o.o.o.o.o

They start giving him the suppressors as an injection, but still he's sedated and tied to his bed for a week. Jee's the only orderly that sits with him like they're supposed to, spoon-feeding him soup and wiping up what slops out of Zuko's slack mouth.

"I'm sorry, kid," Jee says every time, and when he finds the books stacked in the corner, he starts to read them out loud.

o.o.o.o.o

Two things happen after Zuko is finally untied: he gets a new roommate, and someone finds the roof.

"After a very long discussion, we have decided that some fresh air would be quite helpful to some of you," Joo Dee beams. They are given lumpy, odd-smelling wool coats and taken up in groups of four or five, to a six-by-six box of wire fencing. Toph latches on to the hem of Zuko's coat and shuffles around in his wake.

"They locked us all down for a few days. Joo Dee sounded angry, but she was scared underneath. Gotta wonder what would happen if we all organized."

She pulls him to a stop at the fence, waiting for the perimeter to clear a bit.

"They took her stuff, too, but I scrounged you something. After dinner? By that room you two always used for sex."

He's glad the cold can hide his blush.

Jee's not on shift that night, so the common area is packed with disappointment. Zuko's on special watch now, and there's no chance to slip away to meet Toph, but he watches her head down the hall and come back to his window.

"It'll be waiting," she says.

"Is it a surprise?"

"Not really."

He finds a break in the routine two days later and sneaks down the hall. The mattress pushed back beneath the covered window, the bed frames tipped like barricades, the thin blankets bunched as pillows—the room is absolutely undisturbed. He wonders if anyone's even used it before, if the door is only visible to people looking for it.

His eyes take a second to adjust, and then he sees: Mai's hood. The jacket always looked too big for her, a tent of cotton and broken closures, but it fits him. Zuko pulls the hood up, and it just covers his eyes.

o.o.o.o.o

"Misery is a choice we make," Joo Dee says in group the next day, hands steepled tightly in front of her. "It is easier to stay where we are, even _fun_. Pleasurable. Misery ensures a steady source of pity and attention."

There's a cold heaviness inside him, somewhere between his stomach and heart. Zuko curls forward in the chair until he's bent double and his hands can reach the floor. The hood still smells faintly like Mai's hair.

"But, of course, no one wants to live so selfishly. We must all be responsible for _ourselves_, for our weaknesses. You choose your actions. You _choose_ to stay sick."

She should consider a confirmation when Zuko throws up on her shoes.

o.o.o.o.o

Lu Ten sits on the other side of the table but doesn't touch it, every now and then throwing Uncle a bemused look, as if to confirm the reality of the whole thing.

"They said there were only certain things we could bring you. I hope you like the books."

He shifts around, trying to see through the thin sliver of space between the hood and Zuko's knees. With his arms holding legs tight to chest, Zuko can fit his whole folded body on the chair.

"Can you take the hood off, nephew? So we can see you?"

"See what?" Zuko murmurs, but they don't hear.

o.o.o.o.o

The roommate is new to Zuko but not the ward—another depressive, like before, but this one doesn't sleep at all, pacing every night from barred window to locked door. He's sixteen, too.

"Five times," he says like it's a badge of honor.

"Why do you keep coming back?"

He shrugs.

"Better here than out there."

"Even with what they do to you?"

"They don't do anything to me. If you smile, and nod, and go along with Joo Dee, you can get out in a few weeks."

"And if you don't do that stuff?"

"You end up like Mai."

Zuko stares down at the blanket, working his fingers into a new hole.

"How long has she been here?"

"Before my first trip," the roommate says, hitting the door and then turning back to start again. "Always here when I get back, too. Don't know if she's ever been released."

When he reaches Zuko's bed, the roommate pauses long enough to roll up his sleeves and show him the hatch marks marching up his wrist.

"It's how you know I'm not that serious about it," he says. "Whenever it gets too much out there, I find a knife and, you know, _cross the street_."

If it's a joke, Zuko doesn't laugh.

o.o.o.o.o

When Mai comes back, she is wearing a quilted, powder-blue housecoat and most of her hair is gone. What's left is cropped close to her skull, exaggerating the ghoulishness of her grey, gaunt face. Everyone gathers at the windows to watch her unloading, scraping patches of frost clear with their fingernails.

She makes it out of the car fine but has to be helped up the stairs, and her eyes roll wild in her head. Toph's fingers slip between Zuko's. When the elevator arrives, and the orderlies shoo them back down to the common room for lunch.

In group, a nurse has to help Mai stay upright in the chair.

"We must begin today with a bit of serious business," Joo Dee says, clapping her hands. "It has come to our attention that some of the residents are sneaking off and _recreating_ in a way that is not compatible with our goals for your rehabilitation."

No one really understands what she means until her next words, and then the snickering starts.

"From now on, any mixed-gender grouping _must_ have a chaperone present at all time."

The twitchers usually find the joke after a few minutes.

"Alright, which one of you jerks had an orgy and didn't invite me?"

Joo Dee loses control to a chorus of laughter, but Zuko doesn't join, staring across the room at Mai's folded hands, resting so serenely in her lap.

o.o.o.o.o

As the fog clears, he tries to catalog all the ways Mai is still the same. At mealtime, she separates her food into neat quarters and finishes one at a time. During group she doesn't speak—just sighs every now and then and stares determinedly out the window. While Joo Dee roams between tables during crafts, Mai listlessly drags a brush across the same section of canvas. At first, she keeps to the catatonics but soon the old pattern is established and she drifts between, one hand feathering across the backs of the chairs.

Same manner, same lack of smile, same demeanor. She remembers everything, it seems, except for him.

Only the roof gives him hope—on Jee's shift, he follows her up and watches from a distance. She walks right up to the fence, facing their wall, and her fingers rise hesitantly, latching onto the metal and giving it a small shake.

o.o.o.o.o

"So you can't recreate the moment. Maybe something similar? Like, just offer her a light."

"This isn't an afternoon serial, Toph. You don't just _magic_ a memory back."

"Well," Toph says, shrugging, fingers closing over his plate. "Maybe you can _bend_ it back."

"Those are my fries."

"I'm blind—I don't know any better."

"That's not how it works."

"What, like you would know?"

Zuko sighs and glances around the little soda shop. This field-trip, ostensibly, is a reward for good behavior. Last night one of the depressives became a twitcher and smashed up the TV and the wireless. But the snow won't melt, and the bus was already booked, so here they sit: Jee and Joo Dee and civilian clothes, silently consuming cheeseburgers and milkshakes.

"Look," Toph says. "If you don't try, you'll never know."

Opportunity comes in the afternoon—they shift into two groups, some wanting to walk through downtown, some wanting to see to the frozen beach. They stop a little corner shop first and then split in the parking lot. Zuko buys a lighter and steals a pack of cigarettes.

He sticks to the back of the group on the way. The town's built on an incline, so they slip and slide their way down a series of hills, in a cloud of exhaled fog. Zuko pulls the hood lower and hunches into the lumpy old coat.

A chain-link fence, padlocked and rusted, keeps them from the beach proper, but Jee finds an unguarded pier over the next hill.

"Just keep off the railing, alright?" he says. "It's too damn cold to go swimming."

They scatter. Zuko leads Toph over to a bench and guides her hands to grip the rail.

"It's all mush," she grouses. "Go do your thing and then come back. My feet can't see on this crappy wood."

Mai stands alone at the end of the pier, off-center, both hands resting on the rail and head bent down to watch the water.

"You, uh, you need a light?"

She answers without turning her head.

"I don't have a cigarette."

"Um, I do?"

She sighs.

"That's nice."

With mittens, he can't get a grip, so he pulls them off with his teeth and fumbles for the pack. Wind puts out the flame three times before she sighs again, leans forward, and cups her hands around the tip.

"So, uh," Zuko coughs, sputtering like a new smoker, "you want one?"

"I guess."

He lights hers tip-to-tip with his, inwardly cursing the suppressors for the millionth time. Mai takes the cigarette and finally looks at him.

"You must be new," she says. "Came in while I was gone."

"No," Zuko says, and his stomach is twisting in knots. "Before they took you away."

"Oh."

She shrugs, flicking ash into the sea.

"I don't remember you."

o.o.o.o.o

Toph holds tight to his arm on the trudge back up hill, lets him sit against the window and braces him in the seat. The bus's grumbling covers any chance someone might hear him crying.

Now he watches for the differences, and it chills him. He wants to grab her and scream in her face _remember, remember, remember—_but she won't. Mai is an island, apart, and she makes no effort to speak to him again.

She was never anything of a talker except when they were alone, but now she finds quiet corners with her roommate and a little circle of other girls. She never smiles or laughs—her participation seems perfunctory and only in response to Joo Dee's watchful rotation. In group, she answers the occasional question in monotone, and her paintbrush makes shapes of houses and smiling people. She is usually second or third in line for pill time, and she finishes every bite of food at dinner.

It takes him a while to realize that she's afraid.

o.o.o.o.o

Mom makes it to the next visit and brings her stupid boyfriend, who spends the whole time blinking very slow and trying so hard not to look high. Uncle's along, of course, and Lu Ten.

"They told us you're right on track," Uncle says. "A couple of months, and they'll be thinking of releasing you."

"Would you like to come home early?" Mom asks, sugar-sweet, like he's still five years old. Lu Ten is glaring at Ikem, arms crossed.

Zuko shrugs. More of him fits on the chair this time—he doesn't have to hold his legs to his chest, can rest his arms on his knees and frown at them through his hair. He half-listens to their questions, drilling his stare into the cracked tabletop.

The common room hums with similar conversations. Almost everyone has family on visitors' day—except Toph, whose parents never come, who sits alone in front of the TV and kicks anyone dumb enough to approach. Joo Dee keeps her distance, beaming before the nurses' station.

"Zuko, would you take off that hood, please?" Uncle asks gently. "Just for a while? It makes me very worried that you won't look at us."

"Dad, it's fine," Lu Ten says tensely. "If he wants to keep it up, just let him."

A bell rings somewhere—visiting hours are over, and the floor groans with shuffling feet. Across the room, Mai stands and so does her father and her stepmother and the baby gurgles and before he can think about it, Zuko's shouting.

"How could you?" he demands, rising, fists clenching thin. "How could you do this to her?"

"I beg your pardon," Mai's father says.

"You won't get it. How could you do this? Your _own_ daughter!"

Mai is watching him sideways.

"Look!" Zuko yells, shaking off Uncle's hand. "There's nothing left of her! What's wrong with you? How could you do this?"

"Zuko!"

He grabs Mai's father by the throat—he doesn't remember crossing the floor, but tables and chairs clatter around behind him. A hundred hands seize him, but he pushes back, squeezing his own hands closed.

"Answer me!" he snarls.

o.o.o.o.o

Zuko wakes a few days later, sedated, tied down again, a needle shoved in his arm and the room empty. He's too drugged to move, to do more than blink. Every few hours, an orderly shows up with a bedpan and a new bag for the needle.

He gets a few monitored visits—Uncle and Lu Ten just visible through the glass set in the door, talking with the Secretariat. Holding his breath, Zuko can just hear them.

"We're keeping him under close observation for the time being. With these sorts of episodes, our first concern is his safety and the safety of the other ward residents. Here, he can receive intensive, focused treatment. But I don't anticipate that this will in any way impede his progress towards recovery."

_Intensive treatment_ apparently involves leaving Zuko alone for hours at a time, constantly sedated, drifting between sleep and this limbless consciousness. Every once a while a doctor drifts in—the one from the evaluation, who had described phantom sessions—just to look over the bed, to make a new mark on the chart and move on.

Two weeks of this, and then with very little ceremony he is unlocked and lifted and shuffled back upstairs, where he is deposited on his bed and left until dinner.

o.o.o.o.o

Toph acts like a crutch—the sedatives are slow to leave him, and compounded by the effects of the suppressors. Jee slips a pack of cigarettes into his hood on the premise of a friendly back pat.

"Come on up to the roof, kid," he says. "You look like you could use some sun."

The snow's melted some in his absence, leaving long wet patches on the ground and bright brown treetops. The fence looks to have rusted in some places, but it keeps his weight when Toph leans him up against it.

With a little pride, she shows Zuko the improvised lighter she's made out of a battery and some wire. He has trouble keeping the cigarette steady, so she lights and then sets it between his lips.

"You look awful," she says, standing close to leech a little warmth. "What did they do to you?"

"Nothing," Zuko sighs, and wraps his free arm around her tight.

o.o.o.o.o

At first, the message carved in his mango slices just confuses him. Toph nudges him down the line when he hesitates and then follows close, sitting right up against his hip, leaning over.

"So?" she demands, after a long silence. "Are you going or not?"

"Going where?"

"Where the fruit says!"

"What?"

The random jagged lines reform into words after a moment, and he blinks.

"Oh."

"Idiot," Toph sighs.

An hour after dinner, Jee stands and stretches and then shifts his chair to face away from the twitchers' hall. Zuko slouches around the corner with the hood pulled tight.

Mai is waiting in the room—_their_ room—but standing away from the mattress and blankets and bed frames, arms tight around her middle, staring at the floor. Her hair's grown enough to reach her ears now, and her bangs are almost back to normal.

"I didn't really know how else to get your attention," she says, when he's closed the door and stuffed the old rags beneath. He sits cross-legged before her, plenty of space apart. "I didn't want say something and risk it getting back to Joo Dee."

Zuko nods. There's no light, but Mai pulls Toph's lighter from a fold in her sleeve and lights a cigarette. Her eyes glitter in the orange glow.

"I don't remember you," she says. "I've tried. I always try, right after, when I'm awake enough to think of it. But nothing comes back. Nothing ever does."

She takes a long, shaky drag and exhales.

"That's my hood, isn't it? I bought it at the shop a few weeks after I got here."

She gives a short, bitter laugh.

"I remember _that_."

"How long have you been here? You never told me."

The confirmation seems to scare her, but Zuko keeps his gaze steady. Every part of him hurts.

"Since I was twelve. I remember most of it. They didn't start the treatments until my second eval."

"What's it like?"

Her free hand drifts up into her hair, just grazing her temple.

"I don't know. Everything just...goes away. Like that feeling you get, when you're really tired and trying to fall asleep and suddenly it's like you're falling and you jolt up at the last second."

He sticks one finger out of his sleeve and traces some nonsense characters on his knee.

"I'm sorry I hit your dad."

"You choked him."

"Well, I'm sorry about that too."

"I don't need protection," she says sharply, and he nods. "But no one ever stood up for me before. So thanks, I guess."

o.o.o.o.o

He's a little mortified to think of what Toph might've told Mai, so for now they stick to simple conversation. They're not even strangers this time—Mai shifts her focus to Zuko and Toph exclusively, giving up her evening's drift to curl up against the radiator at his feet.

Mai takes the lead, and Zuko follows happily. It's hard to rebuild what was never lost for him, but he gives short answers to Joo Dee's questions, draws ponds and waterfalls and a valley in crafts, and in the evenings before lights-out he reads to Toph from an old, approved tome of mythology.

Even the weather seems on their side—cold gives over to balmy warmth, to sunshine on the roof and greening trees and mud squelching beneath truck tires far away.

The coming quarterly evaluation shatters the illusion.

Agitation returns—Mai smokes cigarette after cigarette on the roof, rubbing her arms, and Zuko feels a little nauseous.

"We've done everything," he says. "Exactly what they wanted."

"It feels the same. I remember _that_. It always feels the same."

o.o.o.o.o

This time, Zuko is not taken to a room with a chair and a table and a long row of doctors. Two orderlies escort him to the elevator, and they ride all the way to the first floor, where he is shuffled through a maze of corridors to one small, frosted-glass door. _Chief of Psychiatry—Long Feng_, it says.

Inside, the Secretariat lounges behind a high black desk, smiling.

"Come in," he says, as the orderlies close the door behind Zuko. "Won't you please sit down?"

The cold in his chest isn't just the work of the suppressors. The Secretariat arranges and rearranges some papers on his desktop.

"Do you know what keeps you here, Zuko?"

"Doors," he says, without thinking. The Secretariat laughs.

"Physically, perhaps. But I meant, what compels your residence within this unit."

Zuko sets both hands flat on his knees. His fingers itch with the desire to pull up his hood.

"It was a court order. You committed a crime—willful, malicious arson. The prosecutor was very set on adding attempted murder to that list, but the evidence wasn't substantial enough."

"I know all of this," Zuko says with deliberate caution.

"The court believed—and we naturally agree—that your best interests were not to be served by a lengthy prison sentence. _Here_, we could hope to rehabilitate you. To...eliminate the negative personality characteristics influenced by your past abuse and trauma."

He smiles wider, and leans forward over the desk.

"You were sentenced to six months, and you've nearly served them. Though you have shown remarkable progress, you still have a way to go. However, I can only extend your sentence should you prove a danger to yourself or others."

"I attacked someone."

"Yes, well, that's the other reason I'm recommending your release. Your little friendship is a distraction from your healing. You would both best be served by your release."

Zuko is dismissed with an intercom buzz and a fluttering of the Secretariat's spidery fingers.

Back on the ward, Mai is waiting, shell-shocked.

"They're so pleased by my recent progress," she says. "They think it means the treatment's working. They want me to go for another session."

"When?"

"Soon."

o.o.o.o.o

He has exactly three conversations about the plan.

The first, with Toph, is bittersweet and annoying.

"I've got nowhere to be," she says, shrugging. "Besides, with you gone, I'll be queen of the ward."

"You'll get in trouble."

"They don't know I can bend. Besides, poor helpless little blind girl can't tie her own shoes. I'll be out of the running immediately."

He nods a couple of times, bringing her hand to his cheek so she can feel.

"I won't make it too easy," she says quietly. "Can't let someone ruin the fun again."

The second conversation is with Mai.

"You don't know me," he says and pulls her in. She breaks the kiss, gently, leaning back and licking her lips.

"I don't _remember_ you," she says. "There's a difference. And I trust you."

"You've no reason—"

"Whatever's waiting," she says firmly, and her hand covers the scar, "is miles better than staying here."

The third is with his roommate, who hands over the razor with a bit of bribing.

"Do you know the trouble I went through to get that?" he sighs, swallowing part of the chocolate whole.

"You don't need it to get out," Zuko says, "just to get back in."

"Got me there. What are you waiting for? I told you, _across_, and you're fine."

"You'll call someone, right?" Zuko asks, for the seventh time. "Once I'm out, you'll bang on the door and wake up the ward?"

"Just fucking _cut_ if you're going to cut," the roommate groans. "You live, or you die. Not knowing's part of the thrill."

He raises his open hands defensively against Zuko's glare.

"I'll call them, alright?"

Zuko breathes in and then out. At the first bite of razor against skin, his eyes start to water, but he powers through, drags the blade all the way across.

"Not too deep!" the roommate hisses. "You're gonna need your hands, remember?"

He massages Zuko's forearm, encouraging the blood flow, as Zuko sets the razor against his other arm.

"I'm already getting lightheaded," he says, exaggerating the wooziness.

"Then let me."

The roommate's hand is lightning quick, and Zuko's skin seems to simply unzip.

"You'll call them?" he asks, but passes out before the answer.

o.o.o.o.o

He half-wakes to the sound of Uncle weeping.

"Unfortunately," the Secretariat says. "We see it all the time. Release approaches, and they get anxious. They've grown so used to the comfort of the ward, to the safety and the routine, that the outside world frightens them. They'd rather die than have to try re-assimilating."

He's sedated again, but not tied down, which he'd count as an improvement. Uncle is the only part he hadn't planned on—the gentle hand passing through his hair, the whispered encouragement and regret. Lu Ten stands close to the door, by the echo of his voice.

"Is there anything we can do? I mean, should we just take him home?"

"Leaving the facility, I believe, would be detrimental to Zuko's mental health at this time. We'll return him to the ward. Let him feel comfortable, and then we'll work on reintroducing him to the outside."

He's too drugged to smile, but he feels a little flicker of warmth rise in his chest.

o.o.o.o.o

Zuko is sent back to the ward long before his wrists have healed—the orderlies are forget every now and then to change the bandages, and the sight of his own blood seeping through such pure white cloth leaves him a little queasy.

"C'mon, kid," Jee says, at the start of his shift, tapping the doorframe. "Let's get that cleaned."

Jee takes him behind the plexiglass, to a small room behind the nurses' station. It feels almost delightfully taboo.

The gauze unwinds slowly between them, until the jagged stitches and swollen red skin is exposed.

"Can I ask you something?"

"Sure, kid."

"How'd you know my dad?"

He uncaps a brown bottle and douses a cotton ball with the clear contents, gently wiping around the edges of each cut.

"We served in the same unit. During the war. I always thought he had a cruel streak, but I never imagined he'd take it out on his kids the way he did."

Zuko raises a hand to his face and winces at the movement.

"He did this, y'know."

"Yeah, I know."

Zuko holds both arms flat as Jee begins to wind the new gauze.

"You're better than that. Better than your dad. You didn't deserve that, and you had every right to fight back."

"I wanted him to die," Zuko says, looking down at the floor. "I wanted to kill him in that fire, and it didn't matter if I died, too."

"Does it matter now?"

Zuko nods, and Jee gives him a tired smile.

"Can I have some paper? There's a letter I want to write."

The lettering isn't the quite the perfection he'd always drilled—he has trouble keeping a solid grip on the brush, but Jee helps him seal it with wax and then they're standing on opposite sides of the plexiglass again.

"Would you just hold onto it for a while?" Zuko asks. "Just wait a few days, before you send it."

o.o.o.o.o

He wishes he could start a few fires to help the riot, but the suppressors still sit heavy on his chest. Glass breaking wakes them—it's the first time he's seen the roommate grin and laugh, and they both go charging out into the hall.

Joo Dee screams at them from behind a tipped-up couch. The nurses' station and elevator are barricaded, and the air is alive with laughter and projectiles.

"Don't stop!" Toph says. "Go!"

They said their goodbyes yesterday, but still he pauses, tries to reach for her through the melee.

"_Go_," she says again. "I'm gonna be queen!"

So he turns away from it, as the TV goes up in a shower of sparks and another window shatters, runs down to the craft closet.

Mai is already waiting on the roof, clutching her stomach nervously. All they have is their clothes—he passes the jacket over and she pulls the hood up, so that the edges frame her pointed face and straight bangs. The fence gives way under her hands like tissue paper—Toph made the seams perfect, so it'll drop back and be like nothing changed.

"Wait," Mai says, when he's almost through. "What the hell is that?"

A bag the color of the wall and roof slumps down beside the door. With a wince of pain, Zuko pushes back to his feet and snatches it. The sides fall open, and he sees only a sea of leering blue masks.

"What is it?"

He lifts up one pack—too heavy to be cigarettes—and the bottom falls out, showering gold pieces into the bottom of the bag.

"Jee," he says, gratefully.

They run right up to the retaining wall and stop. Rain makes mist of the compound, darkening even the closest lights. The yard is a yawning blackness, far below.

"Well, Zuko," Mai says. "Time to go."

He knows where the extension is, knows how far and how short and how many steps to the access stairs, but as Mai takes his hand, a little thrill of terror works through him.

She smirks.

"Do you want to kiss me?"

He does, and they jump together.


	2. Injustice

**Rating:** M

**Warning:** major character death, violence, mentions of torture

**Word Count:** 1144

**Notes:** For his betrayal beneath Ba Sing Se, Zuko is repaid in kind.

**Injustice**

Only Azula's order will see him taken down from the wall, so he stays up, a ragdoll twisting in the wind. Ty Lee is lead away in tears, but Mai stands, the tip of one knife balanced on her fingertip. The skin doesn't break.

General Iroh is gone. He breathes and shuffles and blinks, but there is no one behind his eyes. Mai slips a blade from the holster strapped to her ankle and sits down beside him, on the other side of the bars. The Dai Li look in on a schedule, circling between the rooms every three minutes.

She says nothing, but thinks he will understand as she wedges the blade between two loose bricks. The steel is thick enough not to bend, and as she stands, she touches a kiss to the crown of his shiny, bare head.

Azula enjoys the revelry—parades around in a heavy gold palanquin, picks out a peasant every other day for public beatings. She finds in the vaults beneath the palace a massive emerald, said to be the fossilized eye of the very first badger-mole, and has it set on top of a sharp steel pike.

"This is the way the world works," Azula declares to the people of Ba Sing Se, from a balcony aflame with red flags. "Those who are worthy of power take it for themselves. We are your superior. We are your queen."

Over the weeks, red washes through the palace, like blood climbing up over a festering open wound. Victory is stillness and silence. Mai finds a window which opens up onto the roof and faces west every night, marking on her arm the cycles of the moon.

There is resistance. Azula is poisoned twice, and twice Mai stands over her bedside, watching the rise and fall of her chest, measuring the distance between her hand and the pillow. An arrow tears a hole in Azula's side the width of three fingers, and Ty Lee asks to be sent home.

"My duty is to my parents and the honor of my family."

Mai stays.

Azula institutes inspections. She's still too weak to rise from the pillows, so she sends Mai out ahead of the palanquin, to march in silence up and down the ranks. The outer tour takes three weeks to complete. In that time, Long Feng joins Zuko on the wall, as well as the king and a few of his concubines. The one foolish enough to claim pregnancy is simply drowned.

"Loyalty is our most precious resource," the Dai Li general tells Mai, and she bites back a laugh with such force her lip begins to bleed. "Control must be exercised with care. It is when one feels the most secure that one is the most vulnerable."

Fever drives Azula to confession.

"A person who does not have the strength of conviction is not a person," she says, twisting the sheets to silk rope. "We are above, beyond reproach. To be marked with failure _is_ a failure, inescapable. It was a mercy to kill him."

The moon markings wash off too easily, so Mai takes a roll of parchment and brush and ink up to the roof, prying free one thick clay tile for a hiding place. She excuses the missing fingernails as a training accident. Azula is too fogged with poppy tea to care.

Preparations for the eclipse are half-hearted. Any attack will come to the homeland first—the water tribes are still out there, lurking, uncertain of their own coming annihilation. Mai helps move Azula below ground, to a room lined with metal walls and impervious to sound.

Azula is expecting what comes, but Mai is reluctant to silence her final question.

"I don't understand," Azula slurs, caught deep in the web of poppy tea. For eight minutes, Mai has been assured of her powerlessness, but she prefers always to be prepared. "Why? Why would you do it?"

Mai sits at her side, working her blade between the emerald and Azula's tarnished staff.

"You don't know people as well as you think you do," she says simply, emerald in one hand, the other running through Azula's tangled hair. "You miscalculated."

Azula does not resist more tea—she gulps it, gasping, as Mai tilts her head forward.

"Cut him down," she says, before her eyes close and Mai sets a new blade against her throat.

Outside, Mai is met by old men in blue robes.

"Not her!" Iroh bellows, rushing up from behind. "She is ours!"

She gives the emerald to a little boy in the main market square and encourages him to hide beneath the rim of the fountain.

"Until the sun sets and rises again, and you hear only the birds, do not move."

In the chaos of battle, she focuses on keeping hold of Iroh's hand. He is still weak and defenseless in the dark, but they mark west in the sky and keep going. Mai runs out of knives long before they reach the outer ring, but an escort shuffles them onto a train. Iroh greets these earthbenders as old friends.

A camp is set up and waiting in the shade of the outer wall. Mai takes a skein of water and one sturdy knife, and climbs up the wall alone. Iroh makes it no farther than the seventh step before collapsing in exhaustion. He'll understand why she doesn't stop.

She _will not_ remember him this way, so when she sees the rope anchors approaching, she ties a black scarf across her eyes and uses the curve of the wall to guide her the rest of the way. Her concerns about strength are unfounded—she easily pulls each one up and uses the knife to saw away their bonds.

The heat exacerbates the smell—more than once she has to stop, to surrender herself to pointless convulsions. There is nothing inside her to purge, but still her body tries. Once finished, she crawls on hands and knees to the outer edge, to the west, where she peels off the scarf and watches the sun set.

As night falls, the scarf is repurposed for a mask. She rips flags down and wraps each body, head to toe, arms crossed over chests, legs straight. The moon pities her enough to stay hidden.

It would be easy to figure out which one is him. To compare height, to seek out the narrow shoulders and slight build, the sharp jaw and high cheekbones and glassy amber eyes. He is both here and not here, as Mai herself.

It takes a few tries, but eventually a spark catches, and she watches flames march down the line. She feeds the fire until only bones are left.

Wind takes the ashes towards morning, when Mai turns away and starts back down the wall.

"I'm sorry there wasn't more," she says, and only the birds answer.


	3. Lust

**Prompt:** Lust (May 3)

**Rating:** Mature

**Warning:** sex; lots of sex

**Word Count:** 1194

**Notes:** See above. But for those who prefer a little plot with their porn: Mai and Zuko are stuck in the south pole for reasons not important right now, and Mai decides Zuko's done enough work for one night.

**Lust**

"I'm cold."

"Me too."

"I'm _bored_."

"So what?"

Mai sighs. All of this effort put into display—wasted. The soft candlelight, the draped furs, the creamy expanse of her pale curves so artfully arranged. Zuko hasn't even looked up from his papers, let alone turned to look back at the bed.

So she rises and crosses the room with quiet steps, sliding her hands over his shoulders and down his chest, slipping inside his robe.

"_Zuko_," she murmurs, nipping his earlobe, "your work will wait."

One hand travels farther, dips down past the loose belt of his trousers.

"_This_ won't."

He leans back into her touch with a sharp gasp, as her warm hand circles and dances around him.

"But my paperwork. You're bad for my concentration."

"Never heard you complain."

"I'm complaining right n—"

His voice dies in squeak when her fingers finally make contact and squeeze gently.

"Come to bed."

Her hand drifts from base up, and she relishes the shudder that rips through him when her thumb grazes the tip.

"Yes, my lady," he says hoarsely.

He stumbles out of the chair, so malleable in her steady hands. Between lingering kisses, she peels off his robe and coaxes the trousers down his hips, turns their bodies and nudges him slowly towards the bed. His knees hit the mattress, and he drops onto the mattress bonelessly.

This is always her favorite part.

She smirks at him, at how quickly his protestations wither, how the brush of her hands up and down his thighs can draw from him the most delicious moans and gasps. He gives up control so easily.

"_Please_," he begs, eyes closed, biting his lip, as her fingers close around him again.

"You'll have to be more specific than that."

She runs her tongue up the underside of his length and then trails back down with small kisses. Zuko can be..._excitable_, so she goes slow, drawing out the moment, bit by bit taking more and more of him in her mouth, humming, sliding her tongue over each vein and groove, until her husband is a wordless, quivering mess.

She knows every quirk of his body so well, can tell by the clench of his fists and hitch in his breath that he's close, oh-so-very-close, so she releases him and stands, taking away her lips and hands and tongue.

"I think that's enough for now," she says. "I'd hate for this to end so early."

He only has strength to rise to his elbows and beckons her closer with just the hunger in his eyes. She climbs up, straddling his thighs, cupping his jaw with both hands and kissing him. His own hands work up from her hips across her back, finding the ribbon in her braid and tugging it loose, spilling her hair across her shoulders.

She can feel the ribbon tickling across her skin as his hands continue along, traveling up her arms, gently circling each wrist and guiding her hands down, over his shoulders, down his chest and back along her own thighs. He's smart to distract her by deepening the kiss, so that quite suddenly he's brought both wrists together behind her back and tied them deftly with the ribbon.

"Zuko—"

"You've never fought fair, my lady," he murmurs against her neck, gently lifting her and reversing their earlier positions. He takes time arranging pillows beneath her head, ensuring her relative comfort, grinning wide at his accomplishment.

"Enjoy the upper hand while it lasts," Mai warns.

"I intend to."

He starts with just touch, fingers gentle and seeking every knot in every muscle, from her feet up to calves and thighs, kneading, kissing each point of tension released. Warmth floods her, steady breath now faltering, sighs contented, fingers twisting up in the bedclothes beneath her.

He avoids the juncture of her thighs, kissing each hipbone, tongue laving ticklishly around her belly-button. Her hands itch with the desire to run through his hair, and she bites her lip, determined to deprive him of the satisfaction of hearing her beg. He holds her stare as his lips reach her chest. He teases her, left hand slipping between her thighs, lightly running up and down.

"You could always ask," he says, and the warm puff of his breath across her breast draws only a shiver. He dips one finger down, just grazing her clit, and she shivers, unable to silence the gasp. "A simple _please_, my lady."

But she shakes her head, and his onslaught begins in earnest.

He edges back down the bed and parts her knees. There's no preamble—he's never been all that patient.

"Beautiful," Zuko whispers, and then his tongue is running the length of her, slowly, up and down again, avoiding exactly what she needs, circling around and massaging. She tries to control instinct, tries to keep her hips still and her breath from catching, but Zuko is very, _very_ good at this part, and his name is her mantra of exhalation as the heat inside her rises.

She has the control, at least, not to scream as the climax washes over her—only a soft cry escapes, as Zuko leans against her leg and smiles.

"Get up here," she says, and he takes the bait.

She waits until his waist is level with her thighs, then hooks her legs behind his back and flips them. He laughs on impact, her hair whipping around them, and Mai settles back in his lap. With one hand he loosens the ribbon and the other guides him into her, and they both release quiet sighs at the sensation.

They stay still for a moment, relishing, her head leaned against his, free hands settling on his shoulders.

"I love you," he breathes, and she quiets him with a kiss, lifting her hips away and sliding back down again. She's only willing to do the work for so long—she twists and tugs and pulls him around, never breaking contact, until he's above and she's bellow, hair splayed over the pillow.

He lifts one of her knees up, and she cries out at the new angle, pulling him down, crushing the empty space between them. They are perfect together, like this, as she rises to meet every thrust, whispering little encouragements against his mouth.

He likes to watch her, and she likes to watch him watching, so when she feels the warmth, the wave of pleasure at her center cresting, she opens her eyes and finds his. He shifts, one hand sliding down between them, pressing his knuckle against her clit, circling, kneading, bringing her closer and closer to the edge.

"I love you," she gasps out, capturing him in a kiss, hands in his hair, stifling her satisfied moan. He follows her a few moments later, hips slowing, shuddering, face buried in her neck.

He's always reluctant to separate but afraid of hurting her, but she pulls his head to her chest and shifts a little, letting him curl against her side.

"There," she says, her fingers combing through his tangled hair. "That was infinitely more entertaining than any stupid paperwork."

"Might not even need the blankets," he chuckles, kissing along her collarbone.


	4. Sympathy

**Prompt:** Sympathy (May 4)

**Rating:** K

**Warning:** none

**Notes:** The natural consequence of yesterday's prompt fill.

**Sympathy**

"I just wish there was something more I could do."

"I could stick a few knives in your gut—see if that evens things out."

Zuko laughs, bringing their twined hands to his lips for a kiss.

"You're mean when you're in pain."

"And whose fault is that, again?"

She pulls him to a stop, bent nearly double.

"Remember, the physician said to focus on breathing."

"Oh, well, thanks _so much_ for the reminder. Here I was, focusing on the crippling pain."

He laughs again, and had she any breath to spare, she'd join.

"Besides," she says, as the contraction passes, and she takes a few steps forward, "I think I'll ignore the advice of anyone who mistakes quickening for some sort of parasite."

"He corrected the diagnosis."

"Yes. To the assumption that I'd just gotten fat."

"He means well," Zuko says, and dodges Mai's glare. "He's very good with burns."

"Still, in the future, I think I will defer to one who understands the process on a personal level and who herself contains the apparatus of delivery."

"The midwife is waiting, my lady," the attendant says at this, from a few steps behind. "She's arranged things in the Lady's suite."

"Not in our room?"

Mai smirks.

"I forget—you're not acquainted with the indelicacies of birth."

"Indelicacies?" Zuko repeats hesitantly.

"Blood, gore, screaming, tears, rent flesh and broken bones..."

"Bones?"

He glances quickly to her pelvis and back up.

"Oh, not me," Mai assures him. "Just you."

"Don't tease him so, my lady," the attendant laughs. "I'll hardly have the strength to carry him back should my lord faint."

"I don't think it'll come to that, Yuki. We could always stop and have the baby right here."

"Heir to the Fire Nation born in a turtleduck pond—I can hear the bards already."

"It would make for a lovely portrait."

Mai stops again, stifling a groan in the fist of her free hand.

"Maybe we could wait to mess up her life until she's born," she says, as Zuko rubs gently between her shoulders.

"You're so set on it being a girl?"

"Sometimes you just know."

"We did a needle test," says Yuki helpfully. "Circle means a girl."

"The universe is always on my side," Mai says, nodding. "Soon enough the children will be as well."

"Child_ren_?" Zuko says.

"I could be persuaded. All pain is temporary. Although your best chance probably rests with the poppy tea."

"Unless I end up needing some myself."

"In due time."

He pauses this time, and as she turns back in question, he cups her cheek and leans down for a kiss.

"I love you so very, very much."

"You'd better," Mai says, fighting down her smile. "I _am_ having your baby."

"What d'you think? Should we head back, and get this whole thing started?"

"This _whole thing_ started twelve hours ago, Zuko," Mai says. "And no. I want to stay here. I like it."

"Didn't we just have this discussion? I don't think the turtleducks will appreciate—"

"I'm not having the baby out here."

"Well, then let's—"

"And I'm not going inside."

She shakes off his hands and walks—_waddles_, he thinks, but would never be stupid enough to say aloud—over to the cypress tree and the bench set beneath it.

"I am not going inside, because once I do, that's it—then this is _happening_, and there's no chance to go back or start over. We made a person, and she's almost here, and I don't think I'm ready for that."

Her words come faster and faster, and suddenly the reserve, the stoicism, the perfect calm he's always known is crumbling away and Mai's eyes are wide with fear, _real_ fear, the kind he's felt himself so often, late at night, lying awake and wondering at the mystery of what they'd made together. She reaches out for him, and he holds her tight.

"What if we mess this up? What if we turn out just like our parents, or she's difficult, or she gets sick, or _you_ do? What if we're bad at this? What if _I_'m bad at this?"

"Then we'll be bad at this together."

"Zuko—"

He leans back to meet her eyes and is shocked. He can't recall seeing her cry, ever, not even when they were children and she broke her arm falling from a tree.

"We're _going_ to be bad at this," he says, gently wiping the single tear which escapes her control. "We're going to make huge mistakes and small ones, and she'll probably hate us when she's fourteen, and she _will_ be difficult, because she's my daughter and yours and _we_ were never easy."

A laugh escapes her.

"But we'll figure it out. We're going to do this, because she's coming and no matter if we stay out here or go inside this _is_ happening, and there's no changing that. We'll figure this out. We helped save the world. We escaped the Boiling Rock."

"_You_ escaped."

"Until you were released and I saw you again, there was always a part of me still there."

She leans into his chest with a sigh.

"You practiced that, didn't you?"

"Only a little. I've gotten better at improvising."

Another contraction hits—he can feel, where her belly presses against him, the stiffening of muscles and her sharp intake of breath.

"I'm sorry so much of this rests on you. I wish there was more I could do."

"Didn't we just have this discussion?" Mai says wryly. "Yuki, my knives."

"Of course, my lady," Yuki says with a smile. "Shall I fetch the launchers?"

"No, a few stilettos will do, I think."

"You're mean," Zuko says, taking her hand. "Shall we?"

"Alright," Mai replies, smiling back. "Let's go. I'm ready to meet her."


	5. Hush

**Prompt:** Hush (May 5)

**Rating:** K

**Warning:** none

**Word Count:** 559

**Notes:** Follows "Sympathy"

**Hush**

She wakes slowly, and it takes a while for her to realize that the bed is empty, when it really shouldn't be. The bedclothes still hold the impression of their absent bodies: a flat pillow where Zuko's head had rested against hers, the valleys and hills of a blanket were his body had curled around hers as she curled around the baby. Their warmth remains, and the faint hint of perfumed oils the Fire Sage had anointed the baby with, shortly before being shuffled out.

The half-closed curtains diffuse the light—it's hard to tell from the angles what time it might be. Mid-afternoon, certainly, drawing on to evening. Mai shakes the few hours of sleep from her limbs easily and lifts the slight blanket from her still-swollen middle. The pain hadn't been much of an exaggeration, so her movements are slow and cautious, as she slides her legs around and then scoots to the edge of the bed.

After a moment of rest, she stands, steadying herself on the bedpost. The shift is a little disorienting, but she's reluctant to disturb the house. The servants deserve a bit of rest and revelry—she can still hear, distantly, the chimes of celebration echoing up from the lower city.

A robe waits for her on a nearby chair—her fingers are slow with the clasps and ties, and her head is still swimming. The midwife, were she around, would no doubt order Mai back to bed.

The open terrace door is her first hint, and Mai steps out into the courtyard, into the warm rasp of insects and the glitter of sunlight on damp leaves. The attendant is asleep on a mat pulled beneath the katsura tree's shade, snoring softly with exhaustion and one arm thrown across her eyes. If she were sure she could accomplish it, Mai would pull a blanket over the girl, but any form of squatting or bending over seems sure to end in disaster, so she settles for a smile in the girl's direction.

It would be scandalous, on any other day, for Mai to step out of the royal apartment as she is: bare feet and hair loose, with no ornamentation denoting rank, no entourage of guards or ladies-in-waiting or servants. The palace will, thankfully be empty of all but the essential staff for the next few days.

She doesn't even have to think—she knows exactly where he is.

The cypress branches overhead scatter the waning light. Zuko sits on the bench beneath, the baby cradled in his lap, one hand supporting her head, the other occupied with tracing her tiny brows. He looks up at Mai's approach and smiles, shifting aside the swaddling so that she might sit.

She has to use his shoulder, settling with a wince of soreness, and he shifts, hand leaving their daughter's face to wrap around Mai's back as a brace.

In seven days, the Fire Sages will come for the official blessing. Then, she will be publicly named, presented to the citizens, and anointed as Crown Princess. She will announced as heir, the first of many, the face of the new court. She will be a daughter of the Nation.

But for right now, she is simply _theirs_. Mai reaches out, running a finger over her little lips, her button nose and plump cheeks.

"Good morning, beautiful," she whispers.


	6. Decadence

**Prompt:** Decadence (May 6)

**Rating:** T

**Warning:** mentions of violence

**Word Count:** 1070

**Notes:** Mai as Marie Antoinette, when revolution comes to the Fire Nation. Remember, the root word here is _decay_.

**Decadence**

A guard bursts into the room and collapses to his knees, blood pouring from a wound in his shoulder.

"The Lady," he gasps. "They're coming for the Lady."

With effort, Mai rises from the chair and gestures for the maids to gather. The wounded man is rushed from the room as Mai is helped into her cloak. Her attendant's fingers slip on the closures more than once—she is shaking and trying very hard not to, so Mai gently touches the girl's paled face.

"We are well-protected in these walls, Yuki," she says firmly. "And we will be far away before they can break through."

"Yes, my lady. I'm sorry."

"It's alright."

She turns to address the room, taking up a lantern.

"Let's go and get the children."

One of the guards opens a door hidden in the wall—a servants' passage—and one by one they all file in and descend the narrow spiral stairs. Mai does not have the balance for a last look back and would not waste the effort, regardless.

The children are awake. Yu Lan is crying in the crib, while Xia struggles to hold onto her brother.

"The babies are sad," she says, far too grave for a little girl of six. "Where's Daddy?"

"We're going to find him," Mai says, putting on a brave smile. "Let me take Jintao. Why don't you walk with Yuki?"

Jintao would rather play with one of the guards' helmets, oblivious to the room's tension, so Mai takes up Yu Lan and the lantern and they all re-enter the passage. Faintly, she hears the breaking of glass and the dull drone of an approaching riot.

Zuko is waiting in a small annex off the library, pacing, surrounded by guards and a few nervous footmen. He looks up, startled by their approach, as Jintao squirms free and toddles over.

"You shouldn't be up on your feet," Zuko says to her, quietly, Jintao settling on his hip.

"I don't think there will be any rest in this house tonight," Mai replies. They exchange a short kiss and a quiet look, as Xia folds herself up in Mai's robe.

"I should've sent you away before this."

"Who says I would've gone?"

Most of the palace was cleared when the rioting began a few days ago. Only the most loyal remain now, gathered into this small room, waiting for help that is not sure to arrive.

The crowd is getting closer, and the guard spoke truth: they scream for her blood. The Spendthrift Queen, the usurper succubus, the Fire Lord's puppeteer, the Whore of Omashu or—depending on one's political leanings—New Ozai. The pamphlets had circulated for weeks and stirred up resentment—Zuko had never been popular, for his reforms and demilitarization, but there was still some caution against outright sedition. Attacking Mai proved easier and more profitable.

It's a front. A coup, masquerading as populist revolt. Azula's escape cannot be counted as coincidence.

Through the night, the campaign gets only louder. There's no use distracting the children, either, but Zuko manages to rock Yu Lan back to sleep, and Xia calms herself by listening to Mai's belly.

"When will the baby be here?" she asks, as Mai gently combs through her hair.

"Very soon."

"Will she be a girl?"

"We won't know until she's here."

The maids remain huddled near the door and jump when it opens, near dawn.

"They've taken the towers, my lord," the guard captain says gravely, bowing. "They are at the gate, but it's holding. And—"

He steps aside.

"The Avatar has arrived."

"Aang!"

Zuko rises and embraces him, which Aang returns halfheartedly.

"I had to swim," he says, a hollow joke. "They would've killed Appa with cannon fire."

"Then the capital is lost," Mai says, accepting the gentle squeeze of his hand over hers. "We'll leave."

"There's more," Aang says softly.

"Yuki, would you take the children?"

She feels faint, as Xia leaves her arms, and folds both hands over her belly.

"The Dai Li. They've taken Ba Sing Se. Sokka and the White Lotus are on their way now."

"Only Omashu is left to us."

"_You_ have to go," Zuko says. "You take the children, while Aang and I stay, to hold them off."

Her instinct is to protest, violently, but the baby gives a gentle kick beneath her fingers.

The servants bring up old, ill-fitting clothes, and they prepare the children together. Xia, as always, has a million questions.

"Where are we going?"

"Away. To the Earth Kingdom."

"Is Daddy coming?"

"No, he has to stay and help Uncle Aang."

"Are we going alone?"

"No," Zuko says, tying the brown cloak beneath Xia's chin. "Captain Jee will go with, to protect you and the babies."

"What about Mama?"

"She can protect herself."

Mai shares his smile.

Provisions are packed, as Mai exchanges her robes for a billowy peasant dress, which does little to hide her belly.

"You'll take the tunnels out of the city proper and then be met by a carriage. Once you are across the water, you must head for Omashu. The White Lotus will be looking for you, but keep out of the cities if you can."

Jee silences Zuko's nervous ramble with a firm hand on his shoulder.

"By my honor, Fire Lord," he says, "with whatever strength is left to me in this life, I will keep them safe."

Aang offers a blessing of protection, and then the rest of the room withdraws, allowing them a moment alone. Even the shrieking crowd seems to quiet.

"Mai, I swear—"

"No," she says. "No promises, no demands, no assurances. We say goodbye, and then we let your safe return to me be a pleasant surprise."

"I love you," Zuko says brokenly, and she kisses the tears from his cheek.

"I love you," she replies steadily. "Now say goodbye."

"Goodbye."

The entrance to the tunnels is as narrow as the servants' passage had been. They must go single-file, Jee leading with Jintao on his back, followed by Xia and the bags, with Mai carrying Yu Lan. There is no room to look back—and she won't and can't. She has to stay calm and strong, for the children.

But as the passage closes behind her, as the door snaps shut and the light narrows to the lantern in Jee's hand, a coldness closes over her heart that has nothing to do with the wind whistling through the tunnels.


	7. Entanglement

**Prompt:** Entanglement (May 7)

**Rating:** T

**Warning:** none

**Word Count:** 1099

**Notes:** Mai and Zuko, meeting again in a different Earth Kingdom, during a different war. If Ozai were more about political tactics than flash, if Zuko had turned his back on the Fire Nation after Zhao's assassination attempt, if seven years passed instead of three.

**Entanglement**

The door closes behind her half-drunk, giggling sisters-in-law, and Mai lets out the breath she'd been holding. They're nice enough girls—sweet, simpering, always with a smile and fluttery little wink and a delicate laugh. They remind her in a way of Ty Lee, which means they are best encountered separately, in short bursts of bubbly attention.

They mean well, and are so happy to call her _sister_ now—Kaede and Umeko and and and—

Mai frowns, twisting the cherry blossom sprig from her hair. She'll have to ask the servants, or find a family tree somewhere in the library. The eldest is already married, ripe with her second child. Middle's being sold south, to placate some under-lord or minor officer. The third is yet a baby, all plump cheeks and bright smiles. She had been adorned in the lightest cloth of them all—her father's most precious possession now. He must choose his final alliance carefully.

The bed curtains, closed but untied, twitch slightly in the mirror's reflection, and Mai smirks.

"If you're going to watch, you ought to be a bit more discreet about it."

Never one to acknowledge defeat, Zuko doesn't move, voice drifting up from the darkness.

"What are you wearing?"

"My wedding clothes," Mai says. "The white cherry blossoms represent purity and innocence and my origins in the Fire Nation. The jade comb with ivory lotus represents wisdom, sincerity, and wealth. The pearls are a sign of wealth, purchased from my new father-in-law's son-in-law's southern coastal family. The jasmine, of course, is sexual passion and virility."

"What about the chopsticks?"

"In case I get hungry."

He's trying to be smooth and stealthy, but whatever his silly little costume is made of sticks to the silk—he drags along a blanket in standing.

"You look ridiculous," he says.

"You're one to talk. I just _adored_ you in _Love Amongst the Dragons_ this year. Though I'm glad to see the ponytail is gone. Can't imagine it fit well under that—what's it called? Skull cap?"

He glares at her from beneath a mop of tangled hair.

"Oh, I'm sorry," Mai says acidly. "Were you expecting pity?"

He launches across the room, pinning her against the vanity, fury in his sneer and sparking eyes, fire escaping with every sharp breath.

"Help, guards," Mai whispers mockingly against his lips, "the Blue Spirit's going to ravage me."

He punishes her with a bruising kiss, pulling the pins from her hair, crushing petals and violently throwing the comb to the floor. The pearls clatter down the wall, free of their string, and Mai grins against him, nipping Zuko's lower lip.

"That's more like it," she says, pushing back on his shoulders.

"What's the point of sleeves that cover your hands?" Zuko asks, rubbing a pinch of the fabric between his fingers.

"They make me look dainty and sweet. Plus it means I need a servant to feed me, so my husband has to be rich to keep me from starving."

"I don't like you in green."

"Then be useful, and help me take it off."

"You'll make a cuckold of your husband on your wedding night?"

"Cheng Fu is many things," Mai sighs, as Zuko unwinds the ribbon from her waist. "But jealous will never be one of them. He'd welcome your bastard into the house—save him the horrifying trouble of envisioning the stable boy's face in place of mine. Why do you think the bed was made for only one?"

He gets stuck on the obi, so she nudges him towards the bed, watching as he peels the black shirt from his skin, kicks aside his soft leather boots, and wiggles the trousers past his narrow hips. The body exposed is rigid with muscle, lean, marked with mending bruises and old scars. Mai steps out of the kimono and gently extracts the last few pins from her tangled hair.

Zuko sits on the edge of the bed, and they regard each other in silence for a moment, bare but unabashed. Mai trails a few pointed fingernails along her side, from her hip up to her breast.

"You've...grown," Zuko says hoarsely, gripping the bedsheets beneath him.

"In all the right ways, I hope."

She has lain with others and so has he, but still he is gentle with her, exploring every inch of her body with tongue and hands and lips. She has no need to stifle the moans and cries he draws from her—the house will be empty in blessing, as the revelers carry on somewhere distant, toasting the happy couple's fertility with warm wine.

It is odd to think of him as the little boy she once knew—the awkwardness, the shy blushing and nervous smiles are familiar, but these hands are calloused, this skin thatched with downy hair, these eyes dark, hollow and haunted. He coaxes her to completion and then follows, trembling, face buried against her neck, gasping for breath.

They share a pillow, facing each other, as his hand runs through her hair. They say nothing, and she falls asleep with his head tucked beneath her chin.

She rises first, a bit before dawn, sliding her feet to the floor and then resting. Zuko's hand reaches up from the bedclothes to caress her bare back, to twine through the curtain of her hair.

"I don't want you to stay here," he says quietly.

"I think your wants are immaterial. A transaction was made, and I intend to honor it."

Only her head turns, chin dipping to her shoulder.

"You don't know the damage I can do from where I am. Cheng Fu's father is quite old, with only one easily manipulated son. Imagine the chaos one could sow with so malleable a puppet. Money can only buy so much loyalty."

His lips follow the trail his hand blazed, up to her neck.

"This is only a stepping-stone. Ozai would use me against the king directly."

"Empires have fallen for less."

She does not move. Zuko curls up against her back, arms sliding around her middle.

"Come with me," he says, and the sound rumbles through his chest and into hers. "We'll set fire to this place, destroy them from the outside."

"We both work from the shadows. We both have the same goal. It's only in our methods we find difference."

She nods to the jade comb, to its ivory lotus blossom.

"A gift from your uncle. A congratulations. And a message."

She turns and kisses him.

"This isn't goodbye."

"It's not?"

His confusion is sweet, and deserves a little smile.

"I'll know how to find you," she says, "when I need you."


	8. Conviction

**Prompt:** Conviction (May 8)

**Rating:** T

**Warning:** major character death

**Word Count:** 607

**Notes:** Zuko finds Jet and Mai at the Boiling Rock, but only one makes it back to the temple.

**Conviction**

"Talk to me about revenge," Zuko says, and they answer at the same time.

"It's fuel."

"It's waste."

Jet settles carefully beside him. Mai doesn't move.

"You live it. You make it an anchor. Remind yourself every day that it's a reason to fight. _The _reason."

"It's pointless—if you can't roll with it, you absorb the blow and get up again. You don't make yourself a target for further attack."

Jet talks with his hands, scraped knuckles and bitten nails flashing along the edge of Zuko's vision.

"It's easy to just forget. To put it down and walk away and just go on like nothing's changed. Easy, and less painful, and cowardly. To face it, to own it, to look in the eye of what you've lost and declare yourself unbowed, unbroken—that's strength. So you keep it close."

"To let yourself be consumed, to become a slave to the past, forever living for what can never be, for what never was, for what will never be again. That isn't life. That's just existence. You have to learn the difference."

"What if I can't?" Zuko asks.

Mai's sigh washes over him. Jet blinks.

"You have to," they say together.

"How?"

Only Mai has an answer.

"You simply will. It's not a matter of _can_ or _want_ or _must_. You simply _will_."

He nods against his knees, legs pulled tight to his chest.

"I'm so sorry, Li—"

Jet winces.

"Zuko," he corrects, and the name falls oddly from his mouth. "I'm sorry. You had to make a choice. There was no way to know—"

"You died because of me."

"I'm still here," they say, each with emphasis on a different word.

He feels empty, and reaches out to trace her thin, bloodless fingers. Jet's tentative hand finds his shoulder and squeezes gently.

"If she loved you—"

"And I did."

"—she'd want you to move on. To keep going, keep fighting."

"You didn't even know her."

"He knows _you_," Mai says softly. "Maybe that's enough."

A ragged sob breaks past his lips, and he hides his face, unable to stop.

"What do I do?"

Jet's hand jerks away and then back again.

"I...I don't really know."

"You leave," Mai says. "You leave me here. Remember, mourn, but _leave me behind_."

He can almost see the curve of her smile if he only looks from his ruined eye.

"She didn't die because of you."

"I died _for _you."

Her sigh—the echo of wind through the empty temple chambers.

"I made my own choice. I did what I wanted to do—I wasn't afraid."

"I'm afraid," Zuko whispers.

"Of what?"

"What if I'm wrong? What if we don't win, and all of this was for nothing? What if you—?"

"Don't make me a tether. You tried once. Don't make that mistake again."

Jet shifts again, eyes darting around the room.

"Look, you can't stay in here. She—she's gone, but she'll always be with you. That's what happens when you lose someone. They stay with you. They're part of you."

"Don't waste what I gave you, okay?"

Zuko stands. There's no tremble in her voice—no voice at all. Mai's face is closed and grey and empty, and two small, flat stones weigh down her eyelids. Her hands have been crossed over her chest, her hair combed, her body washed and wrapped in a length of white linen. All that remains is to light the pyre and leave.

Jet sits close, bracing Zuko with a strong arm, as Appa lifts off. Sunset obscures the smoke, but Zuko watches the temple, watches the tiny orange smudge of fire until the horizon rises up and swallows her.


	9. Lightning

**Prompt:** Lightning (May 9)

**Rating:** K

**Warning:** none

**Word Count:** 705

**Notes:** none

**Lightning**

Zuko explains the whole contraption with a pair of nails gripped between his teeth, so she hears only bits of what he's saying. Mai just nods, hoping her face doesn't look half so horrified as she feels.

"We'll be among the first," Zuko says, like it's a good thing. "Right now, they're laying the cables from Republic City to Ba Sing Se, down to the Southern Tribe capital, back up to Omashu and Kyoshi Island and Air Temple Island. Just imagine—the whole world connected. Of course, that's still _years_ away, but at least we'll start here."

He finally looks up from the floor and blinks at her expression.

"What?"

"I..."

It's difficult to criticize such enthusiasm, so she tries to soften it with a half-smile.

"I just don't see what's wrong with messenger hawks."

"They take too long," Zuko says, shrugging. "With the telephone, you can have a conversation with someone hundreds of miles away—as though they were standing in the same room."

"Yes, but—"

"Just _imagine_. Instead of waiting weeks for a letter, we could _speak_ when I'm away."

"We've always done just fine with letters—you answer them so promptly."

"Yes, but, what if there's an emergency? Rather than _waiting_ a few weeks, I could know right away."

"And still be several days' journey distant."

He deflates a little.

"You don't like it."

Mai sucks in a breath, thinking.

"It's just so...new. So untested. And think of the industry—all those falconers and wranglers and breeders. The postmaster, as well. We've had his family over for dinner before."

"Telephone workers will replace all those jobs and more. And think of the free time! For the servants especially. Rather than ringing a bell and waiting for someone to come up and then relaying the order and _then_ waiting for the task to be completed—"

"Okay."

He grins.

"Okay?"

"I suppose I could try it. For the servants' sake."

"Jing Li's not what he used to be."

"I beg your pardon, my lord," Jing Li says from the doorway, bowing. "The company men are here for the inspection."

Zuko springs up with the excited bounce of a toddler, scattering the tools. Mai eyes the telephone tower, rising imperiously over the desk and its clutter.

"Company men?" she asks. "What inspection?"

"Yes, they're here to help us figure out where to lay the cable."

She follows Zuko from the room sideways, unable to let the telephone out of her sight. Jing Li directs their momentum to the foyer.

"You know, you still haven't explained how exactly the telephone works."

"Oh, I don't really understand it myself, just that—"

"Just that what?" Mai says pleasantly, but her eyes narrow, and Zuko is careful to avoid her gaze, hand rubbing the back of his neck.

"Nothing."

"Just that _what_?" she says again, punctuating each word with a millisecond's pause.

Seeing the baby, he quickly ducks into the courtyard, zigzagging between the hedges and benches.

"Zuko."

He's always using the children as shields, so she takes the baby from him, curling the warm little body against her hip. Zuko is left empty-handed, eyes wide, prey caught in a spider-wasp's web and all-too-aware of the approaching end.

"It might, sort of, in a small, unimportant way...run on lightning power."

"Lightning."

"Yes."

"_Lightning_."

"Yes?"

Even Jing Li winces.

"It's perfectly safe," Zuko says weakly.

"As safe as your last encounter with lightning?"

"Well that was—"

But Mai has finished with him, whirling around to address Jing Li.

"The children are not to be allowed anywhere near that thing."

"Yes, my lady."

"It's to be locked up—at _all_ times."

"Yes, my lady."

"And the maids as well. And you yourself will not be compelled to use it unless you so choose."

"Your concern flatters me, my lady."

Zuko sheepishly receives her renewed glare.

"It's perfectly safe!" he says again "You'll see. It'll be very useful. Soon enough everyone will have one, and you'll be able to talk to Ty Lee and Suki whenever you want—"

"I most certainly will _not_."

"C'mon, Mai, the kids will love it. You'll get used to it. Xia can call Ryo and Umeko and Kya—"

But Mai has only one more proclamation on the matter.

"Over my dead body."

(She would be proven half-right, in the end.)


	10. Duty

**Prompt:** Duty (May 10)

**Rating:** K

**Warning:** major character death

**Word Count:** 928

**Notes:** I made myself sad.

**Duty**

He tells it like a joke, but there is a tremor in his voice.

"It feels like there's a party somewhere, and we haven't been invited."

Katara wipes at the tears gathering beneath his eyes and marvels for a moment at her own wrinkled hand—the creak of bones will not let her forget her age, but sometimes she is still surprised at it, expecting the smooth skin of a girl and finding instead the gnarled, knotted fingers of a mother and grandmother and widow.

"I'm so sorry, Zuko," she says.

Two of his granddaughters accompany them inside—pretty girls, mirrors of their father mostly, but in their thin fingers and thinner smiles there is something of Mai, by way of their mother.

"Do you need anything, Grandfather?" one of them asks, while the other sets out tea.

"We will be quite alright for a while," Zuko says, settling onto his chair with a reedy sigh. "I'll ring the kitchen if we need anything else."

They bow and withdraw, closing the door tight.

"This library," Zuko says with a tired smile, "has been set aside for my personal use."

He does not look up to meet her eyes, focused instead on his loosely curled hands, his shoulders bowed by more than age. His skin stands out ashen against the white robes.

"How is the Avatar?"

"Well enough. Brash. Excited to begin firebending. She's still very interested in meeting you."

Zuko nods.

"Bumi passed through a few months ago. He said your dear little Prince-General has grown to quite an exemplary officer."

"I'm pleased to hear it."

"And what of your other grandchildren?"

"Oh, scattered about, I think. Still gathered from the coronation."

"Xia will make a fine Fire Lord."

"We had to change the titles, just for her. Her husband will be Prince Consort. Any after that shall be Princess Consort."

"Then she was the last Fire Lady."

"She was."

A few tears spill over, as he turns to look up at a portrait of her. Katara follows his gaze.

It must have been made prior to their wedding or as a private commission: rather than the traditional heavy robes and crown, she is pictured simply, in red and gold, unadorned, with those familiar ox-horns, given up briefly for the traditional topknot. Her expression is open, almost challenging—not a smile, when such a gesture was rare and so reserved for the worthy—eyes so finely detailed, as though awaiting response to a query. Those straight shoulders, imperiously lifted chin, and only one hand visible, raised in blessing.

"She was beautiful."

"_Was_," Zuko repeats bitterly. "Already we speak of her in past-tense, only three days gone, and—"

He cuts himself off, with a hand over his mouth, stifling even the appearance of a sob.

"We were going away. Once Xia had settled in, and the councilors been prepared, and the capital calmed. All the places we'd never been. All the places I promised I'd take her."

Again, the tiniest tremor betrays him.

"That's all I ever had to give her—promises. A lifetime's worth, and every one broken. We'll go away, I'll abdicate, we'll have another child, I'll spend more time with you, I'll be better than—"

A sob breaks loose this time, and he crumples forward. Carefully, she sets down her cup, stands, and crosses the room to him, with what speed her old bones can manage.

Zuko is a shell of the man she knew, an echoing and hollow ache in place of the old uncertain smiles. She can still see so clearly their wedding day, decades ago, Mai walking the courtyard with Zuko behind, his fingers reaching for the trailing wisp of her sash. Then the birth of children, the happy exhaustion which brightened their eyes, the noise, the joyous disorder. All of what she had once shared with Aang, and a little more: a house full of grandchildren and the first few great-grandchildren, the peace of retirement and rest.

"Oh, Zuko," she says, and then nothing else, as she pulls him into her arms and holds him close.

"How can she be gone?" he chokes out. "How could she leave, when there's so much left to make up for? All my mistakes, my years of neglect, all the times I _could have_ and didn't. How could I let her go and not follow?"

"I have asked myself the same."

He leans away, wiping his face clean.

"Is it a terrible thing?" he asks quietly. "Lingering on, and hating it, but feeling in some way that you're paying penance? This is what I deserve. This emptiness. There isn't a single stretch of tile or tapestry that isn't poisoned with memory."

Her hand finds the curve of his jaw, and she tilts his face up, that he might meet her eyes.

"She wouldn't have you thinking like that. Mai loved you. She was happy. You gave her a good life. And she isn't gone from you. Not entirely."

"Not all of us can find our spouse's reincarnation so easily," he says, but the smallest of smiles breaks through.

"Look to your children," she says gently. "I see Aang every day. In Kya's laughter, in Bumi's smile, in Tenzin's eyes. Aang and Mai—they're waiting for us. And we will join them, in due time."

"But for now, we live?"

"As best we can."

She returns to her chair, slowly, as Zuko sighs and takes up his tea.

"I had her for eighty years," he says, gazing up to the portrait again. "I suppose I can wait a few more, to see her again."

* * *

At least, my dear,  
You did not have to live to see me die.

Considering now how many things I did that must have caused you pain,  
Sweating at certain memories, blushing dark blood, unable  
To gather home my scattered thoughts that graze the forbidden hills, cropping the mind-bane,  
I cut from the hedge for crook the one disservice  
I never did you,—you never saw me die.

I find in my disorderly files among unfinished  
Poems, and photographs of picnics on the rocks, letters from you in your bold hand.  
I find in the pocket of a coat I could not bring myself to give away  
A knotted handkerchief, containing columbine-seeds.  
A few more moments such as these and I shall have paid all.

Not that you ever—  
O, love inflexible, O militant forgiveness, I know  
You kept no books against me! In my own hand  
Are written down the sum and the crude items of my inadequacy.

It is only that there are moments when for the sake of a little quiet in the brawling mind I must search out,  
Recorded in my favor,  
One princely gift.  
The most I ever did for you was to outlive you.  
But that is much.

—Edna St. Vincent-Millay


	11. Disturbance

**Prompt:** Disturbance (May 11)

**Rating:** K

**Warning:** major character death

**Word Count:** 665

**Notes:** Set just prior to "Duty". Again, I'm sorry.

**Disturbance**

"Is there anything else I can get you, Grandma?"

She squints at him from beneath the iron curtain of her fringe, perhaps trying to remember to whom he belongs.

"No," she sighs. "Come sit with me. You're my favorite, you know."

He laughs, but obediently perches on the bench beside her.

"That's only because I'm the heir."

"Well, of course," Mai says, tapping her cane lightly against his shin. "And I expect to be looked after."

"On my word as Crown Prince."

"Crown Prince-_General_."

He ducks his head a bit.

"An honor, but—"

"Well earned, I think."

She dares him, eyebrow raised, to challenge her.

"I'm the youngest ever."

"The United Forces are still new," Mai says. "Give it time, and soon enough some upstart youth will be nipping at your heels."

He laughs again.

"Enjoy it while it lasts. One day you'll have to start considering domesticity. Your sisters already settled, and there's you, flapping out in the wind."

"Grandma—"

"I was a bride at eighteen, and yet here you sit, years past your majority, still a bachelor. Is there a particular girl, at the least?"

"Well, not exactly—"

"Then a boy perhaps?"

"Granny!"

"I can be quite open-minded," Mai says with a teasing smirk. "Your grandfather spent a few years in the navy, you know, and the stories he'd tell—"

"Mother, are you frightening the children again?"

"Nothing of the sort, Fire Lord."

"Hi, Mom," Iroh says, standing to bow. "Or should I say _your majesty_ now?"

"This is why you were never allowed to spend time alone with the children, Mother," Xia sighs.

"Look at him—so rigid, so military. He could use some loosening. I'm merely suggesting."

"Mother."

"I see the coronation has drained your wit. Where's your humorless Prince Consort?"

"You know you've only made yourself a target," Iroh says with a smile, which Xia returns.

"I only came to see if you were alright here, Mother."

"I am. I have my dear grandson for company."

"You're sure the sun isn't too much? We could open Father's library."

"Oh, I think I'd like to bask a while yet."

Xia frowns but nods.

"Alright, Mother. Use the telephone if you need something."

"I most certainly _will not_," Mai sniffs, tapping her cane firmly.

With a kiss to her son's cheek, Xia sighs and wanders way, shaking her head.

"Sit down again. You're keeping me company."

"Yes, Grandma."

So back on the bench again, facing out into the courtyard, they sit together. It's a bright summer day, glowing with warmth, and Mai sits forward, both hands draped on top of her cane, welcoming the sunlight with one of her rare smiles.

Far out near the pond, Zuko has gathered the younger grandchildren and great-grandbabies, exaggerating a few bending forms for demonstration, laughing. His voice doesn't quite carry, but Iroh can easily imagine the story he must be telling—one of hundreds _he_ had always been told, sitting so happy and attentive across the pai sho board.

"You know I only bother because I love you," Mai says quietly.

"Yes, Grandma. I know."

A cloud passes overhead, and her eyes close briefly.

"If there were anything in my life I could go back and change, it would be to spend more time with my children when they were young."

She reaches out, and he brings her hand to his face, smiling gently. Her fingers are cool and trembling.

"_This_ is happiness," she says. "To be surrounded by the family you've built with one you love. And I do love him. Your grandfather gave me a wonderful life."

"Are you feeling alright, Grandma?"

"Quite alright."

With another smile, she turns to look out at Zuko.

"Quite alright," she says. "I don't want to make a fuss."

"I could take you back inside—"

Her hand falls from his cheek, and her cane clatters away as well.

"No, no," she says, more and more soft. "I feel wonderful. Though I might rest my eyes for a moment."


	12. Family

**Prompt:** Family (May 12)

**Rating:** K

**Warning:** none

**Word Count:** 684

**Notes:** Jinzen & Cui Lan are Sukka's eldest twins.

**Family**

Zuko readjusts the furs, needlessly, drawing a small laugh from Mai.

"Secure those blankets any more, and you'll need a locksmith to get us all out," she says, her small gloved hands closing over his.

"It's a distance," he replies, affectionately defensive. "And firebenders are naturally adverse to the cold."

"I'm not a bender, Zuko."

"I am!"

Little Xia wiggles forward on the sleigh's bench, dancing arms hindered by her coat and the weight of the blankets, face shining in the moonlight. She grins up at her parents, gap-toothed.

"Of course you are," Mai says, tucking a loose strand of hair back into Xia's hood. "So snuggle close."

"Keep Mama warm," Zuko agrees.

"And Baby Sister?"

"And Baby Sister."

Xia sets her head on Mai's belly, humming.

"You know," Mai says, hand resting on Xia's hood, "it might be a boy. Wouldn't you like a second brother?"

"No," Xia says firmly. "I don't like boys. They aren't fun."

"Your father is a boy. Don't you like him?"

Xia peers up at Zuko, who is re-checking the sleigh's runners, oblivious.

"I guess," she sighs, but turns back to Mai's belly with a commanding whisper. "But please try very hard to be a girl."

Mai laughs, as the trailing end of their party comes swarming up the hill. Sokka carries one of his many children on his shoulders and a few of the others beneath his arms, stomping with jolly exaggeration through the drifts of snow. Suki, Katara, and Aang follow, herding the rest along the beaten path.

"There's baby brother now."

Jintao is bouncing along at Katara's heels.

"Where baby?" he demands, tugging at her sleeves.

"Inside, with Gran-Gran."

"It's too cold for babies tonight, buddy," Sokka says. "Hey, there's Daddy."

With a playful growl, Zuko scoops Jintao out of the snow and covers his little face with kisses.

"Want go with baby!" Jintao says through giggles.

"Baby can't come outside," Katara says with a tired smile. "C'mon, I'm driving your sleigh."

"Where're we going?" Xia asks, snuggling into the furs as Zuko plops on the opposite bench with Jintao. The elder twins join them, while Sokka and Suki settle the rest of their brood in the other sleigh.

"It's a surprise," Cui Lan says, clapping her hands. "You'll love it."

Katara and Aang steer the sleighs with some sort of snowbending, arms pinwheeling beneath their heavy coats. They turn towards the west and propel the sleighs through hills and valleys of powdery snow, while the children laugh and sing old familiar folk songs.

The wind is bitingly brisk—soon enough every nose is cherry-red, and Xia is pulling the furs up to cover everything but her eyes. Mai only smiles and pulls her closer.

"There!" Jinzen shouts. "Look!"

Light pollution from the tribe capital had partially hidden the stars, but now the sky opens wide above them as their sleigh comes to a gentle stop. Aang slows as well, perhaps ten feet away, grinning beneath his heavy hood.

"What?" Jintao asks, already sleepy.

"Look up," Zuko says, pulling the boy's little body onto his lap.

The sky is a riot of turquoise fire, pulsing green and yellow and blue, beautiful beneath the full moon. The stars wink, wreathed in dusty swirls, like sweetly beckoning fingers.

The children give the requisite _ooh_s and _aah_s, while Katara slips down from the driving platform and wedges up against Mai.

"Tired?" Mai asks quietly.

"A little," Katara sighs, though contentedly. "You were right—three weeks, and Kya's a little bundle of wild energy."

"Which I'm sure is Aang's fault."

"Of course," Katara laughs. "I'm glad you came down, but I wish you hadn't made the trip."

"Anything for family," Mai says, finding Katara's hand beneath the furs and giving it a gentle squeeze.

They stay for a little while longer, and on the trip back, the children fall asleep one-by-one. Zuko holds Jintao in his lap, singing softly, while Jinzen blinks slowly, head falling against Zuko's shoulder.

"Mama?" Xia whispers through a yawn.

"Yes?"

"Did Yue make that for us?"

"Yes, of course," Mai whispers back. "For all of us."


	13. Injury

**Prompt:** Injury (May 13)

**Rating:** M

**Warning:** violence, blood

**Word Count:** 3179

**Notes:** This is a lot more cliff-hangery than I originally intended. A "Day of Black Sun" AU, where Zuko leaves the note a little too soon and spends a little too much time in the bunker. Will be continued in "Meditation".

**Injury**

His memory is funny sometimes, in its selection: here was the carriage all soft gold and bright, with his mother bending down to straighten his topknot, as he fidgeted against the grooming. Here was the attendant's severe mouth forming soundless words, and then his mother's admonishment whispered into his ear, ticklish, followed by his own high-pitched giggle and sigh, bouncing up and down on the cushioned seat.

It cuts out there, or fades, or maybe he just blinked for an exceptionally long time—

"You were _three_," Mai hisses into his ear. "How do you know you really remember any of it?"

Because he is certain of it, certain of the shapes and colors and smells, at least. His mother holding onto him with one hand, Azula curled in her elbow, asleep. The back of his father's robes sweeping up the temple steps. At least, he thinks he's certain. No one's told the story all that often.

"Because it's a boring story," Mai says with a sharp sigh. "Stay awake, Zuko! We're almost there."

She stumbles and drags his body with, cursing his murmur of pain.

"Zuko, listen. Listen, okay? Keep talking. Keep telling me your...your dumb story. Okay?"

His father's robes. It's something concrete, at least, something he can remember from other times and build on. They must have been six or seven steps behind: him, his mother, Azula sucking her tiny thumb. A smattering of servants, sycophants. A phalanx of guards. There were cherry blossoms—

"There weren't."

There _were_.

"Zuko, it was almost winter. You can't dispute the record-keepers."

Then maybe it was the pattern of her dress or the flicker of candles between the columns. The smell was present, certainly, enveloping him as he pulled himself deeper into his mother's skirts.

"It was perfume, then," Mai whispers, and her lips brush against the shell of his good ear. "They threw it all around the stones. I remember _that_. Listen to me, Zuko."

With a finger on his chin, she turns his loose neck and encourages his inconstant gaze to find her steady eyes.

"You need to stay here. And stay quiet. For me. I'll be right back."

Her hand is so cool against his burning skin, and he turns his head just enough to kiss the edge of her palm before she disappears.

The memory hurts much less than the rest of him, so he retreats into it: the temple, the back of his father's robes, the softness of his mother's hand wrapped so firmly around his own. The hushed crowd, the imposing row of solemn-faced sages, the invocation and lighting of incense. He reached with chubby fingers for the unfamiliar little girl at his side and was pulled abruptly away, made to face forward and stay quiet.

Baby Mai. She peered at him from between the folds of her mother's robe, smiling shyly. Her hair was too short yet for a topknot, and so stayed hidden beneath a long red veil. They were at the altar only as long as absolutely necessary, shuffled quickly sideways, to sit among the women, while Ozai and Mai's father finished the official transaction.

Afterward a party was held: bright colors, ribbons, explosions of fireworks. Fire Lord Azulon made a brief appearance at some point. Zuko can still feel the brief thrill of being lifted to the air, his always impossibly tall grandfather leering over that hawkish nose, examining Zuko's face with a critically cruel eye. Zuko remembers, even then, knowing that he must stifle his tears, must appear calm and confident, must bite back his terror until he could hide once more in his mother's arms.

And then came the hands of a thousand eager ladies-in-waiting, pinching, poking, drunk and giggling over him, pulling at the ties of his silly ceremonial costume, then pushing him together with Mai, who was crying, confused and exhausted by the day. She was bribed with candy to keep still, and so was he, while the court painter made a fast sketch on his easel.

In the official portrait, they are compressed, flattened and washed out, and yet somehow perfected versions of themselves—bloated adults in miniature, clubbed hands clasped around a flame and a jasmine blossom. In exile, he had taken an odd sort of comfort from a copy, kept on his ship, hidden beneath a tattered map.

Pain returns him to the present. Zuko curls around its heat, wincing, stifling the cry burning in the back of his throat. It is impossible to tell how long Mai has been gone, but the sun has moved out from behind the moon and all around echoes the panic of a losing battle. He chances a look down and regrets it.

Even without firebending, his father had been the better warrior. The color of his tunic hides the blood—he merely looks wet, soaked from a long rain. His hand, however, pulls away from the wound painted a bright, ugly red.

He groans—he has never known such pain. A burn lingers and lessens, a bruise aches and diminishes, but this broken flesh pulses and screams. No, _broken_ is the wrong word, he thinks. _Cleaved_, perhaps, by one who intended a killing blow to follow.

Two blows, and it was over: one unexpected slice across his rib cage, the shock of it enough to make blocking the stab impossible, and Zuko had so clearly seen the end of his short life approaching on the tip of his father's sword. The earthquake had been nothing short of a divine miracle.

His father, ever fond of drama, wasted just enough time composing a clever eulogy that Zuko had seen the coming collapse a moment before Ozai did, and managed to summon sufficient strength to roll clear, hoping the rocks could accomplish what he had failed to do.

But as the cave imploded around him, Zuko could hear the faint echoes of escape—his father would not waste the effort then, and the guards would, too, be consumed with concern for their own self-preservation. He has no memory of leaving that room, but he somehow did, securing his swords and crawling as far as the corridor before collapsing himself, too exhausted even for shame.

That is where Mai had found him, where she forced him to his feet through sheer fury, where—

"Mai," he says. She has been gone so long now. The sun angles west, and the chaos is quieting. "Mai?"

He can't manage more than a whisper. No good—she won't hear him, might be too far, so he'll have to go looking. Cradling his white-hot wounds, Zuko braces his boots against the uneven stones, preparing to rise, when an explosion rips over his head, somewhere behind the wall.

Mai comes racing up the stairs to his left, patting out flames on the hem of her tunic.

"Where are you going?" she demands. "I told you I'd come back."

"You," Zuko says, swallowing the odd wetness crawling up his throat, "took too long. I was worried."

"I don't need protecting," Mai snaps. "Come on."

She had pulled him up easily in the tunnels but now struggles, setting his arms around her neck and wrapping her own across his back.

"Get up, Zuko," she begs. "We have to go."

Between her abuse and encouragement, Zuko slowly gains his feet, trying and failing to keep most of his weight off of her.

"I've got you," she says. "It's not far."

His face is pressed into her hair, and he breathes deeply. The line of her cheekbone is marred, the skin around raised and swelling red.

"What happened?" he asks, and his voice sounds distant.

"I'm alright," Mai says dismissively, guiding him down a short flight of stairs. "Don't worry about me."

The field is a mess—he recognizes now where they are, as his unsteady feet descend the last step, and he looks up. The military airfield, centered between the barracks, out of the city center and a few miles west of the palace. An array of his father's best airships and war balloons rest, or _once_ rested, here: a column of smoke and fire in the north has consumed most of them, leaving only a scattered few machines salvageable.

Mai guides him to a balloon nearby and helps him sit against the basket wall.

"Stay down," she says. "They could swarm back in at any moment."

He tries to lift an arm, meaning to encompass the destruction with a wave, but everything is so heavy. His head lolls back.

"Did you...do all this?"

She frowns, deft fingers working the knots around the anchor lines.

"Sort of."

With the last line loosened, the balloon lurches up, and Mai quickly scrambles into the basket, double-checking the gate's latch.

"Where are we going?" Zuko asks.

"I don't know yet. Away."

She pulls a stiletto from her sleeve to cut the ballast bags, one by one, and for a few moments they drift with the wind, first a little south and then east, closer and closer to the smoke.

It's getting difficult to keep his eyes open, but Zuko concentrates on Mai's hands, as they pump the bellows, close the furnace, crank the propeller, wipe blood from beneath her eye. She catches his stare and rewards him with a tiny half-smile.

"How's the pain?"

"Less. Almost gone," he says, glad of it, but Mai does not look so comforted. She can do nothing for him now, all her energy thrown into steering the balloon. The sun twists around, and he knows they're headed east, back along the invasion path.

"It's a risk," she says, to herself, and then again in response to his look. "But they took down most of our towers. Even if someone sees us, they won't have anything to hit us with."

"Where will we go?"

He means after, but she's stuck on immediacies.

"East. Then north."

"You know what you're doing."

"Not always," she says softly, smiling at him again. "We'll be alright, Zuko. Try not to talk."

He nods, sinking back against the metal. He's aware, vaguely, that his wounds require pressure or at the very least some kind of bandaging, but his hands fall limp, too cold to move.

"They're surrendering," Mai says quietly, peering over the side of the basket. "They'll be slaughtered."

"What about the Avatar?"

"I don't see him. Or his bison."

"Maybe he got away."

Mai makes an ugly little derisive noise.

"Do we care?"

"Yes," he whispers.

The look she gives him is unreadable.

o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o

In his last few hours of consciousness, Zuko has many instructions.

"Walk in my footprints, and keep to the trees where you can. They _must_ believe that I traveled alone, or they will hunt you."

"They're going to hunt me anyway," she says, but now he has a plan, and determination glints over the fever in his eyes.

"Fly south, and then ditch the balloon in the ocean. Keep to the waterways. Barter for passage if you have to, but don't linger. Don't smile—"

"I never do."

"Don't leave any impression. They should like you just enough to offer charity and then forget you the moment you've left their company."

Every word is a labor for him, drawn slowly from shallow breath, so quiet she almost has to lean against his lips.

"You forget who raised me. I know how to blend. _You_ always stuck out."

She traces the very edge of his scar with one finger, gently.

"Leave my body," he says. "Exactly as it is. No sentiment."

"No sentiment," she agrees, kissing his furrowed brow.

"Tell me..."

He sighs, eyelids fluttering.

"Tell me how..."

"How to announce myself," Mai finishes. "I am to travel to the oasis. Go to the tavern. Look for a man named Fung. He owns a flower shop. Bald. Big ears. Long, thin mustache. I challenge him to a game of pai sho. I play first, and place the white lotus tile in the center of the board. If he comments on the move, I answer. _Those who do can always find a friend._ Then we play."

She takes a stick from the fire and blows the end to a dull orange, marking out the moves on an invisible board, until a thatched and shaky lotus blossom takes shape in the dirt at her feet.

"They'll take me in. Or capture me. Demand to know who told me their secrets and why. I am to say nothing except _I will only speak to Iroh_, until I am taken to him."

He makes her repeat it as often as he can focus his mind to the command, hundreds of times, until his breathing evens out, and he finally drops into unconsciousness. She curls against him and pulls the meager blanket tight, willing his fever away into the night. In his sleep, he whispers.

"Your turn, Lu Ten. You won't find me."

"I'll always find you," Mai says, one hand in his hair, the other passing a soaked cloth across his chest. By dawn, he has gone silent and still, but he continues breathing, shallowly, in a painful-sounding wheeze.

All day she waits, knees to her chest, close enough to hear the rise and fall of his labored lungs. But he makes it to sunset, when the stabbing pain in her stomach asserts itself. She takes a mouthful of water from the last skein and tries to coax a few drops past Zuko's dry lips.

It is an ugly thing, but she prays for him to die in the night. He would want her to leave immediately—there is nothing she can do for him anyway, and each lost day ensures a farther and less certain destination. But she can't bring herself to leave. Not until he's gone.

By morning the hunger is unbearable, and Zuko still draws agonized breath.

Mai tests the edge of a blade against her fingertip. Its sharpness is undiminished—with the tiniest bit of pressure, she can end his agony. On hands and knees she crawls, across the dead fire, through dirt packed hard by her worried pace, up along the dislodged blankets. He is warm, glowing in the blossoming sunlight, skin dry and pulled tight across his closed eyes.

She should say something—something calm or romantic or tragic—but instead she passes her fingers over his face and gently kisses him, only thinking the word _goodbye_ as she sets the blade against his skin.

A sudden crash sounds through the trees, far off to the right, but close enough that whatever's coming will be upon her before she can run far enough. Every muscle screams in agony, but she climbs the closest tree, fingernails freeing themselves in the bark, higher and higher, until the darkness evens out and she is enveloped.

Her heart seizes—they are passing close to where she'd hidden the balloon, approaching from the south. With shaking knees, she crosses to a tree with wider branches and sets herself beside a knot in the trunk. Most of the camp is visible from this position, and a thrill of horror climbs her throat, as she suddenly sees her launchers arranged near Zuko's closed hand.

She has time to count her knives—four—just before the shrubbery is seized in a fit and then disgorges a series of peasants.

"Here we are!" a girl announces. She is short, built like a sturdy boulder, black hair piled high. She is followed close by two water tribe peasants and then—instinct pulls her hands to attack—the Avatar.

"Is that—?"

He gasps, catching sight of Zuko, and takes a faltering step forward.

"Don't!" the water tribe girl snaps, grabbing his arm. "It could be a trap!"

"Yeah, he could spring up and attack at any second!"

That one must be her brother. Despite the previous hunt, Mai can't remember their names—if she ever even knew them. She knows the girls are benders, though: the little one earth, and the other water.

"I don't think so, guys."

The earthbender, kneeling, presses her hand to the packed dirt.

"He's in bad shape. Like, _really_ bad."

The Avatar takes another curious step.

"What happened to him?"

"Nothing we did," the waterbender says darkly. "We never saw him in the city during the invasion."

The brother glances to the earthbender.

"Is he...?"

"Hanging on," she says, standing. "But barely."

They all turn to the waterbender, who frowns and crosses her arms. The Avatar takes a beseeching step towards her.

"We can't just leave him here like this."

"I might not be able—"

But she sighs and throws up her hands, and then crosses to Zuko, uncorking a skein slung beneath her shoulder.

"If this is a trap, they'd better take _you_ first."

A twist of fingers and suddenly her hands are coated in water. The Avatar pulls back the rudimentary bandages, and they collectively gasp.

"Well," says the brother weakly. "We know he's not faking."

They fan out around the camp—the brother unsheathes a black metal sword and faces south, the Avatar keeps close to Zuko and focuses north, and the earthbender comes east, positioning herself directly beneath Mai. Her face turns up, but Mai's terror is silenced by the sight of her milky green eyes.

"Just watch my back," the waterbender says, and suddenly her hands glow as they make contact with Zuko's chest.

The gasp gives her away—the earthbender's head snaps up, and she speaks.

"Someone's in the trees."

Blind, but prescient. Mai has milliseconds to move. Three knives strike the branch just below her, and they tense, misjudging the origin.

With the softness of a cat, Mai drops from the tree on top of the earthbender and holds her off the ground, her last stiletto pressed to the little girl's neck.

"Step away from him," she says, dangerously calm.

They fall reflexively into defensive stances, but she tightens her arm around the girl's middle, flexing the edge of the blade to catch light.

"You're the girl from Omashu."

"Yes," Mai says. "But I'm not here to hurt you. Neither is he. Just step away, and I'll let her go."

"Let her go, or she'll twist that little blade into a nice pair of cuffs for you and Prince Ponytail."

"Don't help me, Sokka," the earthbender sighs, trying to twist an arm free. "Y'know, you've got a pretty good grip."

"Please," Mai says. "We're not here to hurt you."

"Mai?"

It's a trick of the rising light, but Mai looks anyway, just to be sure. Zuko hasn't moved.

"Well, _I'm_ convinced," the waterbender snarls, and the water has formed two thin whips twisting at her sides.

It's real this time—Zuko's chest rises sharply, his fingers twitch, and his cracked lips part.

"Mai? Tell..."

"I'm here, Zuko. I'm right here," Mai says faintly. "How—what did you do to him?"

"I'm a healer. My waterbending—I can manipulate the chi in—"

"Can you help him?" Mai snaps. "Can you heal him?"

"Maybe."

Zuko draws another rattling breath, and the decision is made for her. She drops the earthbender, drops her last knife, and falls to her knees.

"Then I surrender."


	14. Childhood

**Prompt:** Childhood (May 14)

**Rating:** K

**Warning:** none

**Word Count:** 551

**Notes:** Zuko and Mai are seven and six years old.

**Childhood**

Mai lies perfectly still on the massive bed, one hand fisted in the blankets, the other strapped tight across her chest, biting her lip to keep the tears at bay. Mother has told her a thousand times not to cry or embarrass herself while in the royal palace.

The room could hold five of her own bedroom, with plenty of space to spare, but it's only a guestroom in the apartments of Prince Ozai and Princess Ursa—the Fire Lord and Crown Prince have chambers almost unfathomably larger. The half-open curtains let in a little moonlight, so she can just see the far wall.

The court physician told her not to move her arm, but the muscles keep twitching, and the lingering pain makes it impossible to fall asleep. They gave her only a few sips of poppy tea—enough to keep her quiet, but not enough to make her sleep.

A tear escapes—Mai rubs furiously at her cheek, careful not to mess the borrowed nightgown. Princess Ursa had brought it from Azula's room, had helped Mai stand and undress and put it on, and then sat and brushed out Mai's hair before saying good night and blowing out the candles.

The door creaks open slowly, and Mai tries to hunch down in the pillows.

"Are you asleep?" a little voice asks.

"No," Mai whispers, and Zuko appears, tiny flame in his hand. He crawls up on the bed and sits cross-legged beside her, pulling a small bundle from inside his robe.

"Azula got in trouble. Mom's going to make her apologize to you tomorrow."

"Why? I fell."

He opens the bundle and reveals a handful of fire flakes. She takes a few with her left hand, movement a little awkward.

"She _made_ you climb that tree."

"Maybe I wanted to."

Zuko shakes his head.

"Azula's always making you two do stuff you don't want to. Just because our dad's a prince doesn't mean—"

"I did it because I wanted to," Mai says, chewing, staring into the flame he holds steady. "No one made me. Besides, I'll be in enough trouble. My mom's always warning me not to be unruly in the palace."

Zuko makes a face.

"What's _unruly_ mean?"

"Drawing attention. You know, like causing problems. Mom says I do that, and it's bad. It makes our family look bad."

"I don't think you cause problems," Zuko says, eyes wide. "I think you're nice."

He looks down quickly. They finish the fire flakes in silence.

She expects him to fold up the cloth and go, but he scoots a little closer, elbows on his knees.

"Does it hurt?" he asks, nodding at her splinted arm.

"Yeah."

"I'm sorry," he says sincerely. "It's okay if you cry. I won't tell anyone."

She nods, and as if on cue, tears slide down her cheeks. Zuko leans forward and gently wipes her face with the edge of his sleeve.

"Want to hear a story?" he asks. "Sometimes when I'm sick, my uncle tells me stories. They always help me feel better."

"Okay."

So he tells her half-remembered histories and myths, until they both fall asleep. When she wakes up, her arm has dulled to a throb, and Zuko is still there, curled up at her side.

Mai smiles. For a boy, he's not so bad.


	15. Meditation

**Prompt:** Meditation (May 15)

**Rating:** K+

**Warning:** none

**Word Count:** 1265

**Notes:** Follows "Injury".

**Meditation**

Mai kneels at the edge of camp, hands in her lap—palms up, to show their emptiness. They've hidden her launchers, and she submitted to a cursory search, revealing a lack of knives, but still they watch her with suspicion.

It's decided very quickly that Zuko can't be moved—a little color returns to his cheeks, but the examination alone reduces his wheezing to a mere whisper.

"You kept the wounds clean," the waterbender says. It's hard to tell, but that sounds a little bit like a compliment, so Mai nods. "But we're going to need fresh bandages. And a lot of water."

"All the supplies from the war balloon are behind you. There's fresh linen in one of the barrels."

The Avatar volunteers to gather water, as the others fix up the camp, making beds of moss, building a fire, rifling through what little is left of her carefully-organized supplies. Even without speaking, they seem to know their separate roles—to split the tasks evenly and complete them, with smiles and quiet jokes.

Mai straightens her shoulders and keeps her breathing even. She can just see Zuko over the campfire, as the waterbender sets to work.

After a while, they seem to forget they even have a prisoner—someone is always on watch, but they are clearly not trained in discretion. Within a few hours, she has learned all of their names and something of their relationships.

Sokka is the eldest, sees himself as protector—he goes off to hunt around midday, with an array of primitive-looking blades. Before leaving, he pauses at Katara's side, his sister, and his face flashes with concern for her exertion. The healing appears physically exhausting: sweat beads her brow and the tensed muscles of her arms and shoulders tremble.

The Avatar, Aang, is naturally the most interesting to Mai. His name feels odd in her ears, round vowels to long, drawn out. He hovers just behind Katara, concerned but not like the brother. He trusts her strength—seems, almost, in awe of it.

The earthbender, Toph, is left on guard most of the day—odd, considering her eyes, but she obviously has other talents. Mai wonders if it's an adaptation or a side effect of the bending, how easily she is attuned to every sound, to the smallest vibration.

"Hey," Toph says to Mai. "Are you okay?"

The whole campsite brightens, sunlight stabbing into her eyes. Despite the heat, a wave of ice washes over her.

She is only vaguely aware of being caught just before her head slams into the ground.

o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o

It's past sunset when she wakes up. The fire is still burning strong, but the camp has been rearranged slightly—she faces south now, towards a rock overhang that wasn't there this morning. The Avatar sits beneath, with the waterbender curled against him, head resting on his shoulder, eyes closed.

"She's awake," the earthbender reports, from somewhere past Mai's feet.

The water tribe boy—_Sokka_, she tells herself—appears above, as she coughs weakly.

"You, uh, you kinda fainted."

Which Mai neither confirms nor denies, just brings a hand to her face to swipe at the cobwebs of unconsciousness. Her missing nails have been replaced with tightly-wound bits of clean linen, and she can feel a similar patch stretched across the gash on her cheek.

"Here, have some water. I'll help you sit up."

There is no need to exaggerate weakness—her bones nearly creak with the effort of moving. A skein of water is brought to her lips. She gulps and chokes, and gulps and chokes some more.

"Whoa, hey, slow down!" Sokka says, his hand firm on her shoulder. "You'll make yourself sick."

He backs away, and she twists around, finding Zuko behind. The darkness masks any change other than the fresh bandages, but at least he's still breathing.

"He lost a lot of blood," Katara says, very softly, from the opposite side of the fire. "I can't keep—I'll start again tomorrow. He'll make it through the night."

Her hand is already overplayed in this regard—no need for any pretense otherwise. Mai traces the shell of his good ear gently, as Sokka sets a bowl of warm broth and rice down beside her.

"You look like you haven't had a lot to eat lately."

"I was going to cut his throat," she says, in a voice that sounds to small and raspy to be her own. "I didn't want him to suffer anymore."

There is a long silence, in which Mai curls against Zuko and keeps her back to the rest. Sokka is the first to think of an answer.

"Then I guess it's a good thing we found you."

o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o

In addition to discretion, the keeping of prisoners are not among their strengths. They don't even bother to bind her hands or march her out ahead. She walks beside the makeshift litter within slashing distance of the Avatar—they still have her knives, of course, and she flinches when Sokka uses one of her blades to skin his kills.

The temple is cleverly hidden beneath a sheer cliff. They descend on the bison in twos: Katara with Zuko, Mai with Sokka, Aang with Toph. More people are waiting below.

She takes inventory quickly. Another earthbender, Haru, older and self-assured, who frowns at her and at Zuko, but takes the other end of the litter without complaint. Next is a boy strapped into some kind of wheeled chair, with a young face and wide eyes—Teo, he tells her a little breathlessly. The last has no name, just a title and a hard frown.

They try to interrogate her before a bubbling fountain, and she almost pities the attempt. Almost.

"What happened to him?"

"He lost a fight."

"With who?"

"Fire Lord Ozai."

"Why was he fighting his father?"

"You'd have to ask him."

"I'm asking you," Sokka says, but there's no bite to his tone. He is proving more difficult to read than she'd first assumed.

"Zuko planned to join you. To offer his services as the Avatar's firebending teacher," Mai sighs. "I imagine that's what he told his father."

"So he attacked him?" Teo says. "His own son?"

With a cold smile, Mai turns to him.

"Where do you think he got that scar?"

o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o

She never volunteers, but when asked, she helps out. Gathering fire wood and washing laundry is infinitely more productive than sitting night and day at Zuko's side, watching for the slightest twitch of his closed eyes. Within a week, she has grown accustomed to them all—she actually likes Toph and tolerates Sokka, but Aang grates and Katara glares. The others are less wary, ignorant of her skills.

She hates the silence but is reluctant to fill it, to give anything away that is not pulled or pried or twisted. Treason is so new, so untried. She has never felt any particular loyalty to country or cause—this is not her war.

"You had no right to do this to me," she tells him, running a gentle cloth around his wounds. She hadn't really understood when Katara tried to explain the mechanics, but the flesh is beginning to knit together, helped along by careful stitching. He's still closer to ash than flame, skin translucent at the joints.

His lips are moving—in the fever dream, sometimes, he still asks for her.

"I'll forgive you," she sighs, "if you wake up."


	16. Nightmare

**Prompt:** Nightmare (May 16)

**Rating:** K+

**Warning:** Trigger warning for discussion of past abuse

**Word Count:** 1142

**Notes:** Zuko and Mai have an honest conversation about parenting.

**Nightmare**

Mai finds Zuko within fifteen minutes of her arrival—a palace record, despite his express orders to be left alone. She's still in her traveling clothes, peeling off her gloves and tossing them aside, fixing him with a furious glare.

"What is going on?" she demands, slamming the library door hard. "I'm gone barely a week visiting Tom-Tom, and when I get back, the house is like this?"

"Mai—"

"Xia is almost locked in her room—wouldn't even leave her bed to give me a hug. Jintao and Yu Lan are moping in the nursery. Jintao _struck_ one of the nurses!"

"I—"

"Every time I leave—_every time_ I leave, something happens. Someone gets sick or hurt—or you've swanned off to the Republic again, leaving them in the care of just the attendants for days. You apparently can't handle the household alone, even though I do it every day. I feel like I can't trust you."

She crosses her arms above her swollen belly and stares him down.

"Well?" she demands. "You were so eager to speak before."

"You've said it all, haven't you?" Zuko snaps. "There's no need for my defense—you obviously have the full report from the servants."

"You know," Mai says, cold and calm, "I've only carried four children, but sometimes it feels like I have five."

It feels petulant, but he drops into a chair and turns away from her, arms crossed, chewing back the anger in his tongue. Behind him, Mai steadies her breathing and unclasps her cloak.

"This isn't ever how I want to come home," she says, each word measured. "I'm tired. My back hurts, my ankles are swollen, and all week long the baby has given me no rest. I'm going to go put some water on my face, and when I come back, we'll start over."

He uses her absence to calm himself, closing his eyes, turning his chair to the window. When she returns, everything is different: her clothes lighter, hair swept up neatly, face calm and clean. There is already a chair waiting for her beside the desk, which she settles into carefully.

"Hello," she says.

"Hello."

Her attendant sets out tea and then departs the room with a bow.

"How is Tom-Tom?"

"He's well," Mai sighs. "Top marks at the academy. The headmaster says he has a natural talent for leadership."

He pours out her cup and sets it aside to cool before pouring his own.

"He said to thank you for the sword. He's honored by Piandao's invitation and hopes to do you proud. He'll make a fine officer one day."

"He'll have a commission waiting. The Royal Guard, United Forces, the navy. Wherever he likes."

His tea is a little too hot, so he sips slowly. This blend is different from their usual—absent the spices and citrus tang, instead wafting warm, soothing as it rests on his tongue.

Mai sets aside her cup and folds her hands over her belly.

"Zuko," she says, meeting his eyes calmly. "What happened?"

"I don't even know," he says heavily. "It was just...all week, the children were difficult. They missed you, and I was busy. Xia wanted—I don't know. Something. Maybe just my attention."

His cup clatters down, and he buries his face in his hands.

"All day, she was pulling at me. I was busy—I kept telling her to go play and leave me alone, but she just wouldn't. And finally I—I just snapped."

"Did you hit her?"

"What? No! _No_," he says quickly, as cold horror washes over him. "I never—"

"Then what?"

"I wanted to."

"Wanted to what?"

"To hit her!"

He stand suddenly, staggering away.

"My own daughter! I was angry, and my first instinct was to make a fist!"

"But you didn't hit her," Mai says quietly.

"No!"

"You didn't raise a hand."

"No! I yelled, and sent her off to her room."

"And so you're in here, punishing yourself, because you got angry."

"It wasn't just that. I—How could I get so angry? She's just a child. How could I get so angry to even think—?"

Her face isn't painted with the disgust he expected. She looks—she looks almost _sad_.

"Do you think," she says, looking down at her belly, "that I don't sometimes feel the same way?"

She takes a trembling breath.

"Zuko, children are _difficult_. They're small and loud and don't respond well to logic. They want things, and they don't care why they can't have them. Children are infuriating. Ours especially, _because_ they're ours. You think there aren't moments when I wanted to scream at them? You think I haven't ever thought of hitting them?"

A tear rolls down her cheek.

"Mai..."

He sits and takes her hands in his.

"Mai, you wouldn't ever. That's not who you are."

"You wouldn't either," she says. "We're not perfect, Zuko. Neither of us. We love our children as best we can. But we came from ugly places. From people who were ugly inside. It's what we saw, what we learned."

"I don't want to be that," Zuko whispers.

"I know."

"I _promised_ myself—I promised you. I'd never be like him. I'd never—"

"I know."

She extracts one hand and cups his cheek.

"What your father did to you in flesh, my parents did to me in words."

She runs her fingers over the scar.

"I have the same fears," she says. "There are days I want to cry myself to sleep because I'm terrified I'll turn into my mother and break Xia the way I was broken."

"I have nightmares that I end up like him," Zuko says softly, his free hand sliding over her belly. "In that moment, I felt him. Like he was there, inside my head, and I just felt..."

"You're not Ozai. And I'm not my mother. We've lived it. We know what it does. We're not perfect, but we're miles away from what our parents were."

She pulls his head up so that their eyes meet again.

"You are a good father, Zuko. You had a bad moment. I've had them too. And I'm willing to bet, if we asked Aang and Katara or Sokka and Suki or Toph, they'd say the same thing."

He presses one firm kiss to her lips and then another to her belly.

"I'm sorry you came home to this."

His head turns, resting his ear against her skin, trying to hear the baby asleep inside. Her fingers run soothingly through his hair.

"It's alright. But you should go say something to Xia."

"What do I tell her?"

She thinks for a moment and then kisses his bad ear.

"The truth."

He looks up, questioning.

"She's old enough to know. And she needs to hear it from you."

She smiles, a mixture of sadness and affection, touching his scar again, lightly.

"Go on. Go talk. I'll be here."


	17. Scars

**Prompt:** Scars (May 17)

**Rating:** K+

**Warning:** Trigger warning for discussion of past abuse.

**Word Count:** 665

**Notes:** Follows on from "Nightmare"

**Scars**

Zuko knocks lightly on the door frame.

"Can I come in?"

Xia looks up from her bundled blankets and nods. He half-closes the door and crosses the room to her bed.

"Can I sit?"

She nods again and scoots over to give him room.

"Xia, I'm sorry I yelled at you. I got angry, but I shouldn't have done that. I'm sorry."

"I don't like when you're angry," Xia mumbles. Her pose is all-too-familiar: huddled in the pillows, legs pulled up to her chest, face half-buried against her knees.

"I know. But sometimes daddies get angry. And they make mistakes."

"Did your daddy get angry?"

"Yes," Zuko says quietly, and his lips are dry. "A lot."

"Were you good?"

"I tried to be. I wasn't always."

"Then why was he angry?"

There is nothing but sincerity to her: she stares up, wide-eyed, expecting an answer, as Zuko chews his lower lip.

"What do you know," Zuko says haltingly, "about my father? About who he was?"

"He was Fire Lord Ozai," Xia says. "Uncle Aang stopped him and ended the war. Now you're the Fire Lord. Teacher said he was a bad man."

"Sometimes he was. But sometimes he was...sometimes he wasn't so bad."

"Did he buy you presents?"

"Sometimes. When I was little."

"Did he love you?"

"I—"

Again, he falters at her sincerity. His sweet little baby girl, who has no idea of the horrors of the world, who hears an over-simplified treatment of history and accepts it completely. Iroh has been the only grandfather she's ever known, the only point of comparison.

"I don't know," Zuko says.

"You could ask him."

He gives a sharp, involuntary bark of laughter.

"It doesn't really work like that."

"How come?"

"Because...because he doesn't want to see me. He wouldn't answer my questions."

"Why?"

"Because he doesn't love me now."

"That's silly," Xia declares, shaking her head. "Everyone should love you."

"I'm pleased you think so."

Xia unfolds and crawls into his lap, wrapping her little arms around his neck in a hug, which he returns, holding her tight.

"I love you, Daddy," she says.

"Well, that's more than enough for me."

She lets go but stays curled up in his arms, mindlessly tracing his palm with her finger.

"Xia," he says. "I wanted to tell you about my father, because when he was angry, he did bad things. Very bad things."

"Like what?"

"Like this," Zuko says, lifting a hand to his scar. "He hurt me. And he hurt your Aunt Azula, too."

Xia's hand follows his, pressing carefully on his ruined skin.

"Does it still hurt?"

"No, not anymore."

"Why would he do that?" she asks, eyes filling with tears.

"I don't know. Because—he got angry at me and wanted to punish me."

The tears start to spill over, and Zuko pulls her closer.

"Don't—I'm not telling you this to make you sad, okay? Daddy's not sad about it anymore, so you don't have to be either."

He wipes her face with the pad of his thumb.

"I'm telling you this because I want you to know—no matter how angry I get, it is _never_ your fault. And I will _never_ hurt you. Okay?"

Xia nods and seizes him around the chest this time, pressing her face against his shoulder.

"I love you so very much."

"I love you, too, Daddy."

He sings to her until she falls asleep, just like when she was a baby. She is boneless and easy to set beneath the covers. He kisses her forehead before extinguishing the lamp and leaving.

Mai is asleep when he reaches their bed. She had obviously tried to stay awake—the lantern still burns, and a book has flopped from her dangling hand to the floor. Pregnancy has always been hard on her.

He undresses quietly and climbs in beside her, bending away the flame and curling around her angled body.

As he closes his eyes, his heart feels wonderfully light, for the first time.


	18. Sparring

**Prompt:** Sparring (May 18)

**Rating:** K+

**Warning:** none

**Word Count:** 450

**Notes:** Book 3 Fire Nation funtimes, or ways other than sex Mai uses to distract Zuko.

**Sparring**

The servants can stand about and twitter all they like, but so long as her parents remain trapped in Omashu, _Mai_ is the master of the house and can do as she pleases.

Currently, it pleases her to spend as much time as possible with Prince Zuko—in the study, or the tea room, or the garden, or even up in her bedroom. She's no fool to the rumors, but if consort is all she can ever hope to achieve, she sees no fuss in starting now.

And she knows that what pleases her pleases Zuko. He's prone to moping—she doesn't remember that, but three years can smooth even the roughest lines, and she knows she's in no position to judge. Most of her suggestions are moodily swatted aside, but when she offers, in frustration, to throw knives at his face, he suddenly perks up.

The servants gather beneath the shade of two large cypress trees, ready with cool drinks and bandages. At first, Zuko stands aside as well, arms crossed, watching Mai demolish the flimsy targets.

"When'd you learn to throw knives?"

Mai shrugs.

"When I was little. It was something to do."

"I don't remember that."

She almost laughs—landing a knife in the target's face.

"It's not exactly a skill you advertise."

He watches her a little longer in silence, and then slowly removes his heavy outer robe. Mai follows suit, outer tunic tossed aside—and fully expects to read about the scandal in tomorrow's paper.

They are both pale and marked, and oddly shy for having already seen so much more.

"How come knives?" Zuko asks, twisting and stretching.

"Because they were around."

"I mean," Zuko says with an affectionately annoyed sigh, "why pick up knives? Doesn't a nobleman's daughter have more appropriate hobbies? Like needlework?"

"Why? You need something embroidered?"

She's earned half a smile and returns it, as a servant steps forward, bowing and offering up Zuko's dao blades.

"You should ask Azula," she continues, checking her sheathes and gently testing the looseness of each wrist. "I'm sure as princess, her work would far outstrip any paltry effort on my part."

Zuko shudders.

"I'd rather keep my limbs, thanks."

"So would I," Mai says, as they take opposite positions on the hard-packed dirt. "One of the first things I learned, is that the only person you can really count on to protect you is, well, _you_ yourself. Relying on someone else is weakness."

"It opens you to attack," Zuko says, nodding in agreement. He lifts both blades, as Mai raises her left hand, shuriken arranged between her fingers. "Don't go easy on me."

With a tilted smile, she whips the blades at him.

"I hadn't planned to."


	19. Protection

**Prompt:** Protection (May 19)

**Rating:** M

**Warning:** withdrawal, allusion to institutional abuse

**Word Count:** 1824

**Notes:** Follows "Modern". Some Jetko.

**Protection**

"Ah, fuck! Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck—"

"Keep your voice down!" Mai hisses, glancing back quickly. "What are you doing? I thought you knew this place."

"I _did_," Zuko whispers back, shaking out his wounded finger. "They changed the locks."

With another appraising look down the alley, Mai sighs and slips back towards where Zuko has slumped down the wall, frowning. She pushes his sleeves up, past the bandages, examining his battered fingers.

"Let me try," she says. "I have smaller hands."

"I cut too deep," he mutters. "My hands are all numb now."

She takes her hood off and wraps it around her hand and forearm, wincing as she knocks the last few pieces of shattered glass from the frame. With a little twisting and contorting, she manages to grab the latch and open the window.

"I can't believe no one's home," Zuko grouses, as Mai slips inside through the narrow opening and forces the other window wide.

"Maybe they have jobs."

He gives a sharp bark of laughter, dropping their supply bag beneath the sill and stretching.

"Not the Freedom Fighters," he says. "They don't buy into the bullshit capitalist rat-race."

Mai shakes her jacket out, examining it carefully for glass shards before slipping back into it.

"C'mon," Zuko says, gesturing towards a ladder. "There's clothes down somewhere."

She follows him at a distance, trying to take the whole place in. They're still too close to the compound for her liking—Toph can't keep the riot going forever, and who knows what resources they'll pull to find their precious missing money tickets. She vaguely remembers her father talking about donating a new building for the compound.

Zuko rummages through a tipped crate, humming, somehow contented by this oddly-ordered chaos. This warehouse-factory-whatever is sectioned off by ratty curtains and upended shelves, creating rooms and cubicles on what was once an empty concrete floor. Cushions and futons are scattered about, peppered with clothes and shoes and the occasional cup. She sees what might be a makeshift kitchen at the far wall, with an avocado-green fridge and shelves of pots. Above them, sheets have been tied between the catwalks and loft, like hammocks.

"Here," Zuko says, tossing her a bundle of dusty but clean-smelling cloth. "This'll probably fit you."

"It doesn't belong to someone?"

"They don't really believe in personal possessions."

He shows her to the bathrooms—the only part of this building that hasn't been altered. A cursory examination of the room puts her firmly in the mind of factory: old coveralls, showers, faded posters warning the occupants to remain vigilant against accidents.

She's half-stripped down before Zuko blushes and stammers his way to the other side of the partition. Of the two of them, _she_'s the one who should be shy—she knows only impressions where he's seen all.

The institutional clothes fall stiffly from her body—the trousers, the tunic, even those horrible starchy undergarments. She wants to shower, to scrub the place from her skin, but there's no soap around and she's pretty sure those faucets will only spit rust. Instead she pulls on the new clothes: leggings a little short, shirt more like a dress, huge socks meant for a burly man or the tundra. She uses the scarf as a belt and shrugs back into her jacket. Her hair's gotten just long enough to reach her neck, so she sweeps it under the hood.

Old clothes bundled under her arm, Mai rounds the partition just in time to catch Zuko shirtless—the muscles of his back pulled taut as he lifts both arms to slip into the loose shirt he picked for himself. The sleeves are long enough to cover his wrists

"Now what?" Mai asks, hiding her smile when he jumps.

"Well, uh—are you hungry?"

She takes his clothes and then his hand—he still has Jee's bag slung over his shoulder, and he leads her to the kitchen area. Mai eyes the bag apprehensively when Zuko drops it in the center of the sturdiest-looking table.

"No personal possessions?" she repeats quietly.

"Crap," says Zuko. "I didn't think about that."

He shows her where the food and utensils are kept, and then disappears back up into the loft with the bag and their old clothes. When he gets back, she's slicing up fruit and cheese with a frustratingly dull knife.

"I shouldn't have said that," he sighs, delicately sniffing a bit of roast chicken from the buzzing fridge. "It's not that they don't _believe_ in personal possessions—it's just we share a lot. It's better for everyone that way."

They eat their fill and then some. The fruit is soft, bread a little dry, cheese warm and oily, chicken cold—but it's real and it's food and it doesn't come on a perfectly-preportioned plate. Zuko yawns first, and Mai suddenly finds her head very difficult to keep upright.

Back in the loft they find a mat wide enough for both—Zuko seems surprised when she curls up against him, but he's warm and she's comfortable and the storm outside makes it seem much later than it really is. She matches the rhythm of his breathing and then drops into a dreamless sleep.

Hours later a crash wakes her—shouts, excited laughter, a parade of footsteps through the floor below. Zuko has twisted around her in sleep, pulling her close, curled almost protectively against her back.

"Wake up," she hisses, poking him. "Zuko, someone's here."

She covers his mouth to stifle any noise, but he listens for only half a moment before she feels his lips stretch into a smile beneath her palm. He scrambles away and down the ladder before she has time to think of stopping him. There is no other option but to follow.

Mai can see everything from the top of the ladder and stops there. Zuko stands in the embrace of another boy—wiry thin, dark skin and darker eyes, a cigarette tucked behind his ear.

"Fuck, I gave you up for dead," he says, and without hesitating—without even a flash of surprise in Zuko's eyes—he kisses Zuko hard, hands fisted in the loose fabric of Zuko's shirt. Zuko returns the kiss, hands in the other boy's hair, while the rest of the group mills around, oblivious.

Zuko breaks the kiss, blushing, and suddenly everyone's looking up at Mai.

"We need a place to stay."

She descends but retreats into the hood on reflex. The Freedom Fighters are a motley collection of children—teenagers in a variety of colors and heights, and none of them benders that she can tell. They gather around a wide table and stare while Zuko briefly explains their escape.

"Fucking fascists," the other boy says, shaking his head. He'd introduced himself as Jet after letting go of Zuko, offering a dirty hand in salute. "But you're out."

"Sort of," Zuko sighs. He's sitting on Mai's left and passes the food to her. She's not hungry, so she just passes it along. "They'll be looking for us soon enough."

"Shit, that almost makes you a folk hero," Jet laughs, evenly splitting a watermelon. "After the trial, I didn't think—"

"Me either," Zuko says gravely.

One of the other children pipes up, sounding overawed.

"What was it like inside?"

"Bad," Mai answers shortly, stabbing at her empty plate.

She crawls back up to the loft alone—Zuko was clearly missed, but she won't sit in on the reunion. Mai finds a box of books and magazines shoved underneath a window and picks one out. There's a woman on the cover, sitting at the edge of a pond beneath the dead branches of a katsura tree.

It's a decent enough read—she spends most of it plagued by the uncertainty that she knows the plot from before. Night closes over the building but changes it very little. Some lanterns are lit below, and the tinny whine of a wireless reaches her ears. Good-nights are shouted around a few hours later, and Zuko climbs up, grinning, flushed with comfort.

"You should've come down. They're all really interested in getting to know you."

"Guess I would be too," Mai sighs, rolling to face away.

"Look, you don't have to be like that," Zuko snaps. "I _told_ you about Jet—you just don't remember."

She doesn't respond, doesn't move, just breathes and listens to him kick off his shoes and then sit on the edge of the cushion.

"That was a lie," he says. "I'm sorry—I don't know why I said that. I never told you about Jet. I told you I was living with a friend, but I never told you..."

He drops onto the pillow and doesn't reach for her until he's asleep.

What she thought would be only a day or two turns into a month: drugs that seemed to do nothing in regular dosage have created withdrawal she thinks might kill them both.

Hers isn't so bad—night terrors, fever, compulsive jaw clenching that gives her headaches, and constant nausea. She has trouble keeping anything down for more than an hour at a time but still tries to finish the bowls of broth and plain rice Jet brings up to the loft.

Zuko sort of disappears. Whatever the suppressors did before, coming off of them looks brutal—tremors wrack his entire body day and night, and he can't sleep, and twice he tries to scratch off the stitches on his wrists. From the mat she's shoved beneath the window, Mai instructs Jet on cleaning and re-bandaging the wounds.

"He was never like this," Jet says shakily. Zuko's completely, _thankfully_, unconscious. "Before he went in, he never would've—"

"He didn't," Mai breathes, arms locked across her churning stomach. "He just had to buy us some time for the escape."

"_The escape_," Jet repeats with a quick grin, pulling the blanket back up over Zuko's body. "You make it sound like something out of a serial."

"We started a riot. Jumped off a roof."

"Holding hands and kissing, right?"

She doesn't look up, and Jet scoffs.

"Wow," he says, and he's put distance between himself and the mat, pushed awkwardly up against the loft rail. A wave of cold washes over Mai from her toes upward.

"Wh..."

Mai licks her dry lips, ineffectually.

"What does he mean to you?"

"Could ask you the same thing."

Stretching, Jet's fingers just brush Zuko's hair.

"We sort of grew up together. On the same block. His dad was shit, and my parents kinda forgot I existed. I ran away first, and a couple of years later he came with."

"Sounds romantic."

The migraine's starting to intensify—she snaps her eyes closed, hand over her mouth.

"Didn't start that way. I was just trying to look out for him. He kinda needs it, y'know?"

Her own answer is rising up in her throat, and she has no idea what it'll be. She coughs, weakly, dislodging something cold in her chest.

"I don't know," she says. "I don't know what he means to me."


	20. Time

**Prompt:** Time (May 20)

**Rating:** T

**Warning:** none

**Word Count:** 1005

**Notes:** Follows "Meditation".

**Time**

Zuko is awake long before really being _aware_ that he's awake.

The surreality of his fever dreams starts to melt into flashes of light and the lull of voices. All he can think of is Mai, and reaches for her through fog. She's humming just beneath the surface of his skin, and if he keeps twisting, he'll get out from under whatever's sitting on his chest. He wonders if she'll be angry about the note.

He opens his eyes and sees nothing. Just a blank white slate—not painful, like staring into the sun, but warm and empty. Like moonlight.

The next time he opens his eyes, there are shapes. Blurred, smeared, indistinct, like the first few days after the bandages came off and he could wrench his left eye open. He focuses on breathing and lets his vision sort itself—his chest feels tight and heavy, compressed by an unknown weight.

The shapes solidify slowly—walls and a door and a wide stone window covered by a stiff canvas curtain. There is no insignia, no art or even clear architecture to hint where he might be. Zuko tries to remember but his head is filled with a fine white mist.

He is wounded. _Bad_, by the looks of the bandages stretching across his chest. He tries to work a finger beneath the knotted wrapping but thinks better of it when his arm is slow to respond. Instead he lies still, trying to assess the damage without causing more.

His breathing is limited by the bandages, but it's more than that—whatever's wrong is deep inside, coiled just beneath his ribs. His fire is off, too, diminished and flickering where it should be roaring in his bones.

He's reasonably sure, wherever he is, this isn't the Fire Nation. Which means he made it out of the capital, at least. But how—under whose authority, most importantly—is the chief mystery.

Waiting will not help him. Drawing in the deepest breath he can manage, Zuko begins to slide his legs out from under the blanket. His joints are stiff and crack painfully, aches erupting up and down his thighs and back. He exhales, then pulls in another breath and his feet reach the floor.

He cannot break through the pain to sit up but uses his numb hands to pull himself to the edge of this rough-hewn stone bed. Sourceless fear is rising in his throat—there is nothing to indicate an immediate or incoming threat, but the inability to remember inspires panic. He is too cold, and wounded, and, for all he knows, alone.

Without warning, his body slips over the edge, and he falls to the floor, pelvis jarring hard, the back of his head hitting the stone, knocking away what breath he's managed to gather. His vision swims with black spots and sharp colors and for a moment, he's worried he'll be sick.

At least it's not a question of time—he has no choice but to keep still, to hold one hand across his stomach and the other tight to his mouth. Pain radiates in his chest from two sources: a wide swath just below his heart, and a throb near his shoulder.

His breath returns in gasps, a rough wheezy sound, and the back of his throat tickles and feels wet. He's afraid to cough but cannot stop it—his hand is misted red.

He feels the vibrations before hearing the footsteps, and this is what gets him off the floor at last. His legs are too weak to carry his own weight very far—he clings to the uneven walls, lurching along, releasing each short breath in a hiss.

Distantly, voices echo, and he turns the opposite direction—or what he thinks is opposite. The walls and floor, and what little he can glance of the ceiling, are the same uniform white stone, pockmarked and crumbled in places, but devoid of identifying art.

There is no one following, at least, but he wonders how far he can go before being missed. He has no weapons, no clothing but a pair of trousers, and no clear idea of where he's going. At the junction of two corridors he pauses, soaking in the sunlight from a hole cut into the ceiling above.

The last thing he remembers is the morning of the eclipse—the sense of urgency and regret, the weight of his cloak across his shoulders, the fury at discovering his uncle already gone. That's the end of it: he remembers standing over the empty cell, swords drawn, furious. After that, nothing.

He must've been attacked by some guards, alerted in the palace, or one who recovered and surprised him. They should have killed him outright for the treason, but maybe he wasn't discovered. He was careful in the days leading up to the eclipse, saying nothing, training and reading and walking about as before, gave no notice except—

"Mai."

The letter. Written in such a careful hand, neatly rolled, sealed with wax and left in the center of her bed. He knows she would never betray him, but he never considered what might happen if someone else found the letter first.

Footsteps are approaching again—urgent, rapid, followed by voices. He won't be able to run—half-standing as he is, gasping, unable even to keep his head up. He focuses his energy inward, peeling fire from his blood, pushing it out through his cold fingers. It's not his best by far, but it keeps the arrived crowd at bay.

"Stay back," he gasps, eyes roving over each face but seeing nothing. "Just stay away from me!"

Their voices are as blurred as their bodies, muted.

"Just—just don't..."

He breathes in again and pain rips through his lungs. The flame in his hand winks out as he half-collapses against the wall. Someone darts forward, catching his arms with thin, pale fingers.

"It's alright, Zuko," Mai says. He finds her eyes and concentrates, on the dark curve of her lashes and the soft curl of her smile. "You're alright."


	21. Serenity

**Prompt:** Serenity (May 21)

**Rating:** K

**Warning:** none

**Word Count:** 185

**Notes:** none

**Serenity**

Zuko feels an intruder in his own home, and so merely peeks through the tiny parting in the curtains, keeping as quiet as he can.

All of the nursery's furniture has been arranged close to the open windows—constant exposure to sunlight being the best curative for Mai and the baby. This weakness is a natural product of labor and separation, according to the midwife, but still Zuko had sent for confirmation from Katara.

It's only been two days, but he checks with the postmaster every few hours. Just in case.

Mai has made clear her distaste for coddling, sending off the wet nurse and most of the servants—she attends to the nursery alone, hardly stirring from the chair he had set beside the terrace door.

She occupies it now, robe loose across her shoulders, the baby at her breast. Her hair remains in its thick braid, too neat for the chaos of the last few days. One hand holds the baby close, while the other arranges the blanket over her knees.

A breeze stirs the curtains, and he is exposed. Seeing him, Mai just smiles.


	22. Notes

**Prompt:** Notes (May 22)

**Rating:** T

**Warning:** some smut, but nothing too explicit

**Word Count:** 1203

**Notes:** Couldn't help the Farscape reference. Follows "Entanglement".

**Notes**

Mai's contact is the same as every time, a lanky Earth Kingdom man with hook swords strapped to his back and a stalk of grass clamped between his smirking lips. She doesn't know his name and will never ask.

"And how are _you_ this evening?" he says with a mocking bow.

"Soon to be bereaved."

With the slightest flutter of her hand, she passes over the map and the turns to the cabbage stand behind him. The parchment disappears up the man's sleeve as he recrosses his arms over his chest.

"I don't know why I keep trusting you."

"By all means, try retaking the city without us."

"_Us_," he scoffs, kicking at a loose cobblestone. "Talk like you're monolith."

"Of course not," Mai says demurely. "I'm just an innocent Earth Kingdom wife."

"Yeah? I bet that bastard in your belly might tell it different."

He leans in.

"I heard a rumor about you."

"I'm sure you didn't."

"I heard you know him. Seen his face."

"The Blue Spirit has no face," Mai says.

"You're a liar."

She reaches up and plucks the grass from his lips, crushing it beneath her heel.

"That's a filthy habit," she says with a steady stare. "You should get out of it."

She leaves him leaning against the cabbages, catching just a glimpse of shadow jumping to the next roof.

Mai lets herself back into her husband's house through the servants' exit. Her husband is either out or in the stable boy, but in any case his absence warms the house. She peels off her gloves, unwinds the heavy scarf from her hair, unbuttons her cloak, and then carefully arranges the folds of her robe around her body. Whatever the relative delicateness of her condition, there were pretenses to keep up.

At the staircase she pauses, counting the whisper of each footstep as he climbs in through the unlatched library window and then crosses to her bedroom. All the servants are in their rooms save for the porter, who slumbers in a chair near the front door, who doesn't wake as Mai strides past.

Her balance remains unaffected as yet, but she's noticed how quickly the fatigue sets in. She's too tired for even a light quip on entering the bedroom, simply peeling off the remainder of her clothes and climbing beneath the blankets beside him.

Zuko has added a few new scrapes and bruises to his collection—she counts a second scar over his first and kisses it, then travels around to his lips. He knows her body well, and pauses uncertainly at the unfamiliar firmness beneath his caressing hand.

"Is this safe?" he asks, timid, and she laughs.

"You won't do _me_ any harm. But there might be a better angle."

He doesn't like not being able to see her face, so he stretches, flat and supine, as she straddles his hips and guides him in. Her breasts are too tender for his touch, so she sets his hands on her thighs, encouraging his shallow thrusts with a fluttering twist of her hips.

"I've missed your lurking about," she sighs, shivering as the pleasure rolls up her arched back. "How was your trip up the coast?"

"You don't care about my trips."

"Of course not. I'm just making conversation."

His hands drift up her back to her shoulders, pulling her down for a long, soft kiss. He tugs at the pins in her hair until it falls loose around them, a veil against the empty room. If he won't have her voice, then he can be satisfied with her body.

He always wants to hold her when it's over, but Mai stands and walks through the curtain to her private washroom, not bothering with the robe.

"You almost wouldn't know, from this angle," Zuko says quietly.

"You _don't_ know," Mai replies, running a damp cloth over her belly and down between her legs. "My husband's quite wealthy. I could just be well-fed."

She smiles coolly, and he shifts, sitting up against the pillow with a hard glare.

"Maybe he isn't even mine."

"Maybe."

"Maybe he wears too much perfume and prefers the company of stable-boys."

She laughs a little.

"Maybe."

"Maybe he'll come out with a piece of straw in his mouth and two teeny, tiny hook swords on his back."

"Maybe."

Carefully, Mai pulls a brush through her hair, watching in the mirror as thin ivory teeth separate each delicate strand.

"That's my child," he sighs, and she spares him a quiet glance in the reflection.

"This is _my_ child."

"I mean, I'm his father."

"No," she says lightly. "My child is the bastard of a prince—the Crown Prince of the Fire Nation, heir to the throne, champion to his people."

She slides a robe over her shoulders and ties it loosely, turning to meet his glare again.

"The only man I ever loved."

"What are you talking about?" he snaps. "I'm right here."

"No, you're not. The Blue Spirit has no face, and Zuko died a long time ago."

"You make no sense! I _am_ Zuko—I'm all of those things, and that is _my_ child!"

He stands and whips away the blankets.

"You?" Mai laughs, harsh and sharp. "You're a bedtime story parents tell frightened children. You deliver sweets on Solstice Day. My child will have better than that. You're just something that keeps my bed warm at night."

For the first time, she is a little afraid of him. Six months is nothing on seven years, and she knows which stories are true and which are sanitized. Zuko crosses the room in three furious strides and seizes her by her wrists, his face inches from hers.

"You don't know who I am," he snarls, hands tight enough to leave bruises.

"Be nice to me," she whispers, just managing to control the tremor in her limbs. The baby gives a tiny flutter in her belly. "I'm about to become a widow."

Confusion cuts slowly through his anger, and the timing is a bit off—a distant explosion rocks through the house, like muted thunder. Zuko's grip loosens in surprise, enough that Mai can shake him off gently.

"The Dai Li will be coming for me soon. You shouldn't be here."

Zuko takes a shuddering breath and steps back.

"Neither should you. Come with me. I'll keep you safe."

But she just smiles and reaches out to run a hand over his scar.

"Don't say it," he says. "Please."

So she doesn't. They dress separately, and she leads him to the servants' exit.

Her contact will be waiting for her at the docks, if he survived the blast. She adjusts the simple peasant cloak, and, at the last moment, grabs Zuko's hand.

"I won't say it, I promise."

He gives her a chastened smile.

"Everything's going to change now, Zuko. Even if I wanted to, I wouldn't find you."

"Mai, I—"

"Did you know, they wouldn't even give you a funeral? We couldn't mourn. Every new moon, your uncle lights incense for you. Your mother—"

"Stop," he breathes. "Please, stop."

"When you're ready, when you're done with whatever this is, find me. We'll be waiting."

One last kiss—another flutter from the baby—and she leaves him behind.


	23. Fire & Steel

**Prompt:** Fire & Steel (May 23)

**Rating:** K+

**Warning:** none

**Word Count:** 263

**Notes:** caffeinosis gave me the idea!

**Fire & Steel**

Mai swings the blade harder than Zuko expected—he thought the jian might be too heavy for her, but his back slamming into the tree proves her strength well enough.

"Do you yield?" she breathes, eyebrow quirked. A single, perfect drop of sweat drips from the end of her nose onto her outstretched blade.

"Not yet."

He twists beneath her arm and kicks out, flame arcing after his foot as Mai flips away. She scales a nearby tree with quick steps and disappears into the branches.

"Master Piandao was right," Zuko says with a laugh. "You don't fight fair."

"There is no such thing as a fair fight," she replies, and he follows the sound, circling back around to the arena. "If it was fair, no one would win. And if no one wins—"

"Everyone loses?"

She doesn't answer, and he stops, eyes closing, focusing all of his energy on listening. A twig snapping, the scrape of shoe against bark, the flutter of her shredded tunic. She managed to draw blood earlier, and he wipes it from his eyes with a grimace.

He moves at the last possible second—shuriken whispering past his shoulder as Mai flies at him from above. She lands too hard, sword embedded in the tree where his head had been, but she abandons the blade, rolling away, launching arrows he just manages to knock away with a wide swing.

She's more agile, but he's faster and catches her at the pond.

"Yield?"

On her knees, she looks up at him through her heavy lashes, smirking.

"Only if you say please."


	24. Promise

**Prompt:** Promise (May 24)

**Rating:** M

**Warning:** mentions of past abuse

**Word Count:** 2225

**Notes:** Follows "Protection". Some Jetko.

**Promise**

When the tremors leave and Zuko manages to stay awake for more than an hour at a time, summer is baking them all in this brick-oven of a factory. Mai looks more thin and wan than when they left, but she's strong enough to help him down to the kitchen and prop him up while they eat. She and Jet seem to have reached some sort of awkward accord, but Zuko still watches them both closely.

He wonders what Jet might have said to Mai, what she might have told him in return, what's the same and what's irreparably changed—but he says nothing, saves his strength for quiet smiles and nervous laughter.

Mai is still willing to share a bed with him, but she is not as free with her kisses as Jet, ignoring the blankets and curling into her coat. She's the one keeping track of their stashed money now, checking every morning after the Freedom Fighters file out.

Zuko can't look. Guilt pulls at him—Longshot needs glasses, and Sneers could use new shoes, and sometimes the Duke's got an odd cough. But he can't. That money—Jee's money—was meant for him and _Mai_. It's escape money, because he knows, deep down, that they can't stay much longer.

Someone managed to steal a TV in the year of his absence, and at night they all gather around on lumpy old cushions. The Duke plays antenna, one hand waving above his head to clear the snow. Jet distributes blankets, tucking the corners around Zuko's shoulders. After a moment, he tucks the other side around Mai.

"Aw, you guys are down to just two minutes," Smellerbee says. "You got fifteen apiece the first week."

They aren't smiling in any of the pictures shown, and the hotline number flashes for only a few seconds.

"Maybe they'll give up," Jet says with a shrug. "Write you both off as dead in a ditch somewhere."

"No, they won't," Mai murmurs, as Zuko meets her eyes.

It's peak season for scams, so they end up spending most days alone. He tries to talk to her a few times, but Mai buries herself in reading. He's still so tired and hollowed out, so he lies beside the open loft window, watching empty smokestacks and the alley far below.

Jet always spots him on return, and when he climbs up into the loft, Mai climbs down. He has the courtesy not to kiss him on their bed at least.

"You're different," Jet says, his fingers running through Zuko's hair from the nape of his neck up.

"I feel better. Not sure it's all out of me yet, but—"

"That's not what I meant."

Jet squeezes Zuko gently—he's sitting between Jet's legs, back to Jet's chest, head resting on the curve of Jet's shoulder. He take's Zuko's wrists and brings each to his lips, separately, kissing the fine pink scars etched there. Mai had been the one to remove the stitches, with a penknife.

"I didn't—I wasn't trying to—"

"I know," Jet says, kissing Zuko's good ear. "It's just—the boy I knew, the one I grew up with? I could never imagine him doing something like this. Being driven to it."

His thumbs run soothing little circles over the scars.

"Hey, Zuko, this girl. What the hell is she?"

Zuko glances to their empty bed, the bunched blankets and cushions still holding the impression of her slight frame, and he sighs.

"She doesn't remember me. They did something to her, some procedure, to make her—I don't know—_better_. They took her away, took her to a hospital in the city, and when she came back, she couldn't remember me. She told me that would happen, that it'd happened before. She was there for _years_."

"Yeah? Maybe it _all_ happened before. Maybe there was someone before you, someone she strung along until he figured—"

Zuko yanks his wrists out of Jet's grip and pushes away.

"Why do you have to do that?" he snaps. "Why can't you just let us enjoy what we have right now?"

"Hey, I'm looking out for you," Jet says. "Someone has to, 'cause you sure as shit don't do it yourself."

Zuko has no answer for that.

Mai has no answers, either—at least nothing longer than two or three words. He tries to ask about her books, about her day, her thoughts, her silent stares. Everything is _fine _or _nothing_ or _just stuff_. She sleeps beside him, and kisses him good night, and sits to the side, watching him practice bending again.

"Do you feel stronger?"

"Not by much. I mean, it's better, but nowhere near how I was when I went it."

"But enough to go on?"

"Mai," he sighs, snapping up flame between his fingers, a dull gold-orange, "the whole city knows our faces."

"So? We keep our heads down."

"I _mean_, they know our faces now. In another month or two, they'll stop running the pictures. We'll be some faded billboard over the highway."

"Another month."

"It's not so bad, is it?" he asks, not bothering to leave room for dissent. "There's food, and people, and a place to sleep, and they haven't found us yet."

"Yet," she repeats, and that neutral mask wavers for just a moment.

His flame flickers out.

"They don't know," he says, about to reach for her before he thinks better of it. "When they arrested me, I told them I was homeless. No one knows this place."

"Not even your family?"

"We're safe here," Zuko says firmly. "Nothing's gonna happen. I won't let it."

She doesn't really look like she believes him but still nods, and then folds back up with her book.

Midsummer, a thunderstorm locks everyone in the factory—there's never any good grift to be had on rainy days. A deck of cards appears, and they play each other for bits of stolen candy. Mai's made the concession of sitting beside the loft ladder, but she'd still rather read than talk to anyone. Jet sits right up against Zuko's hip, arm drumming on the seat-back behind him, giving bad advice on Zuko's hand.

Smellerbee sits up in one of the window sills, picking her teeth clean with a fork, keeping watch on the alleyway.

"Car pulled up," she calls.

"Nice?"

"Nah. Junker, four doors, could use some paint—oh _shit_!"

"Cops?"

"Can't tell, not uniforms, but they're coming right our way."

Jet shoves him up the ladder while Mai pulls—they shuffle to the back of the loft while the Fighters scatter. Zuko leads Mai around to a crack between two curtains—they can see the front door and Pipsqueak standing beside it, but they won't be seen.

Jet waits through the knocking, fists clenched.

"Sometimes, if you don't answer, they just leave," Zuko whispers.

Another round of knocking and another and then a voice, and Zuko chokes.

"Dammit, we know you're in there! Just open up, Jet!"

He doesn't even look up for confirmation, just waves Pipsqueak aside.

"Yeah, alright!" he shouts back, pulling up the crossbar. "Just calm the fuck down."

He slides the door open with effort, and there's Uncle and Lu Ten hunched against the rain, Lu Ten frowning and Uncle looking so very tired.

"Hello, Jet," he says, pleasant despite the rain soaking through his coat. "May we come in?"

Jet's smart enough not to risk looking back, and even if he did, Zuko doesn't really know what answer he might give. He can feel Mai beside him, breathing fast and nervous. He wants to reach for her hand, but any movement might give them away.

Jet says nothing, just steps aside and jerks his head. They shuffle in, Uncle smiling and Lu Ten scowling.

"Make it quick, 'kay? I got places to be."

"Old ladies to rob," Lu Ten says with disgust.

"Well, only the ones that deserve it."

"We won't keep you," Uncle cuts in, hands raised. "We're here about Zuko."

Jet never has a tell—it's why he's the leader, why he was always the one to do the talking when they went out on grift. He crosses his arms and stares down Uncle without flinching.

"You might have heard," Uncle says. "Zuko ran away from the hospital about a month ago."

"Escaped the nuthouse? What a fucking tragedy."

"It's where he should be," Lu Ten snaps. "Zuko's sick, and he needs help, and those people are helping him."

"Sick?" Jet repeats, eyebrow quirked. "Then get him some fucking soup and a bedtime story."

"You know that's not the _sick_ I mean. He needs to be in that hospital."

"He needs to be wherever he _needs_ to be. And that's not lobotomized by some fucking fascists."

"It's always that simple, isn't it? Jet knows better than every other person on the planet, and if anyone says different, they're a fascist."

"That's about the run of it, yeah."

"Please," Uncle says. "We only wanted to ask, if you might have heard something."

Jet's sneer dissolves as he turns back to Uncle.

"Have you heard from him? Or know where he might be?"

"No," Jet says. "I really don't."

"I knew this was a waste of time," Lu Ten snaps. "Of course you don't know. You don't even care, do you? You don't even _want_ to know why he should go back—what's it matter to you that he's missing and might be dead?"

"I don't care?" Jet repeats, dangerously calm. "I don't _care_?"

"Yeah," Lu Ten says, stepping closer. "You _don't_ care. You're a child, living out some anarchist fantasy, with no idea what you're doing or how you're screwing up the kids who get sucked into this insanity."

"Don't you fucking talk to me like that."

Zuko's stomach does this odd, uncomfortable little flip as Jet shoves off from the counter, fists clenched. Mai grabs a fistful of Zuko's shirt, and he can feel her shaking.

"I'm the one who took care of him—who was _there_ for him, who got him out of that fucking house and away from that piece-of-shit father of his. I don't _care_? Where the fuck have _you_ been his whole life? _I_'m the one who took care of him! _I_'ve been there for him, more than either of you! You saw what the fucking psycho—what his own _father_ did to him, and you just let him go back to that house!"

"There was nothing we could do," Uncle cuts in again, trying to put himself between Jet and Lu Ten. "Ozai wasn't charged, and legally we—"

"_Fuck_ legally!" Jet practically roars. "You _let him go back_. You _left_ him there, and you left Azula there, too! What happened to that girl, you _let_ happen."

"I can't watch this," Zuko whispers. "I can't—I have to go down there."

"Zuko, _no_," Mai whispers back, grip tightening. "They'll send you back. Send _us_ back."

"No, they won't."

"He just said—"

"They won't," Zuko repeats, backing out, pushing off her hand. "Trust me."

"Zuko—"

He doesn't look back, and she doesn't follow, as he crawls along to the ladder. He can still hear Jet and Lu Ten screaming at each other, and Uncle's occasional quiet interjection. He drops down beside the other Freedom Fighters. Longshot shakes his head.

"Don't do it, Zuko," Smellerbee whispers. "It's not worth going back."

But he shakes them off, too, plowing ahead, feeling sick as the voices up front rise.

"Stop!" he calls out, just before rounding the corner. "Please, stop."

"Zuko!"

Uncle launches himself across the floor and grabs Zuko tight.

"You're okay," he says, and then dissolves into sobs. Lu Ten stands in shocked silence, all the fight drained from him.

"It—it's okay," Zuko says awkwardly, arms pinned to his sides as Uncle cries against his chest. "I'm alright. Uncle, it's okay."

Jet steps away, giving them all some space, an unreadable look on his face.

It takes Uncle a while to calm down—Longshot makes some tea when he finally releases Zuko, and they all sit down at the table. Lu Ten asks most of the questions, but the answers aren't whatever he's looking for.

"I don't get it," he says. "Why would you try to, y'know, _off_ if you wanted to escape? You were going to be released in a few days and—"

"I had to buy some time," Zuko says quietly. Uncle is holding tight to his hand and won't let go. "I didn't mean to—I didn't want to scare you, or make you think I—that I wanted to _die_. I just needed so time so we could—"

It shouldn't have taken so long to think of her, but now he stops short, head whipping around.

"Mai?" he calls, rising from the table. "Mai?"

He reaches the ladder before Smellerbee manages to grab his sleeve.

"She, uh, she took off."

The breath leaves him suddenly, and Zuko grips the ladder rungs to keep from dropping.

"What?"

"She freaked out. Grabbed her shit and left through a window."

"Why didn't you tell me?" he shouts, and Smellerbee flinches.

"She asked me not to."

He tries not to believe it, but the loft is empty, and her clothes are gone, and when he reaches their hiding spot, everything's been torn through. He tips it on end and a dozen empty cigarette packs float to his feet.

Feeling sick, he picks one up and stares into the laughing blue face.


	25. Illuminate

**Prompt:** Illuminate (May 25)

**Rating:** T

**Warning:** none

**Word Count:** 4274

**Notes:** Follows "Notes".

**Illuminate**

Jet can't stand the stillness. Keeping in one place drives an itch through his limbs nothing short of a hard drink or a good fight will fix. But he's supposed to be _responsible_ now, supposed to be a leader of men and girls and of this stupid not-moving convoy. He's already asked a bunch of times when the axle might be fixed, and by the look on the carpenter's face, he'd better not ask again.

So Jet sighs and kicks the wheel of the wagon he's been leaning on, and then he shoves his hands into the pockets of his coat and casts a glance down the line. It's drawing on afternoon, and plenty of people seemed to have accepted the inevitable—unloading provisions, starting small cooking fires, spreading the wagon covers out. They're stopped on a curve, so he can't see all the way to the end. But that's what the Fighters are for.

He's got Sneers and the Duke up front, Pipsqueak at the end, with Longshot and Smellerbee running a watch in between. Jet himself keeps to the front, overseeing the whole venture, sending orders through Smellerbee.

They're just a couple days in, and it's not so bad—winter in the mountains is no party, but Jet just turns up his collar and hunches against the wind and waits for the sun to come out again. Snow falls on and off—just so happens to be _on_ at the moment, and while Jet breathes into his cupped hands, he watches a fine white veil drop over the kneeling carpenter.

The tug at his elbow is early, but he doubts he's alone in hating the lack of movement.

"Look, tell everyone we're camping up here. Try to get them off the road, and tell 'em we'll get going tomorrow."

But Smellerbee shakes her head.

"There's a fight towards the back. You'd better come."

With a nod to Sneers, Jet follows Smellerbee back along the line, twisting between mothers and children, ducking outstretched arms. He can hear the ruckus at a distance, the shouts and calls of anger, a woman's scream, the impact of fist on body, and it sends a thrill down through to his bones.

Longshot's already there, arrow notched, not even bothering to shake the snow from his hat. Jet processes the scene in seconds, hunter's instinct already drawing his blades, widening his stance and filling his lungs with air.

"Raise another hand against me, and I'll take it from his flesh!"

A woman, in a thin white dress, sleeves torn and falling down one shoulder, hair a mess and blood on her lips—with one hand she holds a thin knife to one man's throat while the other wrenches his chin up, exposing the vulnerable expanse of skin. It takes Jet just a moment to recognize her, without the cloak-and-dagger.

"Now I'm sorry to interrupt," Jet says calmly. "But if there's one thing I can't abide, it's somebody starting a fight on my convoy without _me_ around to throw the first punch."

The casual viewers start moving on at this, scattering back to wherever they belong, until all that's left is the woman and three men: one bleeding on the ground, one under the knife, and the other standing next to the ransacked wagon, holding tight to a length of ripped brown cloth. Pipsqueak is on the left, closest to the woman, no weapon raised except those massive fists.

"These three," he grunts at Jet, pointing to each man. "Pulled her out of the wagon. Started shouting. She just defended herself."

"We ain't traveling with Fire Nation filth," the bleeding man says, pushing away from them with the effort of just one arm. His other looks a bit torn up.

"Then you _ain't_ traveling with us. This woman here more than paid her way, understand?"

"Ain't traveling with a whore, either," the man replies, as his friend reaches down to help him. "'Specially not with no halfbreed bastard."

In warning, Longshot aims just left of the man's feet and released, and the man flinches on impact.

"Now, you will keep a civil tongue or I will cut it out," Jet says with a charming smile, sliding his blades together and apart. "I understand you boys paid your way as well. So here's what we're gonna do: the woman's coming with me, and Pipsqueak here is gonna be your new best friend. He's gonna ride with you the rest of the way, and if you so much as step off that wagon to take a piss, you'd better ask his permission first."

He nods to Pipsqueak, who is happy to demonstrate, easily lifting the bleeder off his feet and growling the others in line.

The woman—Jet has never learned her name and still thinks of her as just _White Lotus—_drops her arm but doesn't let go of the knife. Her hostage stumbles away quickly, hands wrapped around his intact throat, looking vaguely ill.

"C'mon, White Lotus," Jet says, sheathing his blades. "You're with me now."

He meets her halfway, and she grabs tight to his arm.

"Thought we were rid of you after the crossing."

"So did I," she says, and he keeps his steps slow. "Turns out you were going my way."

Her voice is rough, ragged at the edges, and what skin he can see—too much, for the snow and the cold chattering through his bones—is raw and red, soon to bruise. They'd taken everything but her underclothes—he glances down the length of her and nearly swears.

"That your blood," he asks quietly, "or his?"

"I'm not sure," she says, nails digging into his sleeve. "I don't think I can go much farther."

"It's alright—I've got you."

He lifts her up, an arm around her back and the other hooked beneath her knees. Longshot brings a cloak to drape over her and then returns to the line, leaving just Smellerbee to walk them back.

"There's a midwife on the line somewhere," Jet says. "Find her."

"She won't come," Smellerbee sighs. "Not for Fire Nation."

"Then you give her a copper for listening, and tell her she'll get a silver for coming up front and listening to _me_."

She sighs again but digs in his pouch for the money and takes off at a sprint.

"How you doing, White Lotus?"

She doesn't answer, eyes closed, mouth pinched tight in pain. She's breathing hard, and she's far too light in his arms—Jet can't decide if he should slow down to keep from jarring her, or speed up and get her into some warmth.

"We're almost there," he says, and wishes he could pull the cloak up some.

Sneers and the Duke have already set up for the night—they've got soup waiting and lean over a small fire to warm their hands.

"Carpenter says by tomorrow," the Duke says, and his smile fades on seeing the woman. "Everything okay?"

"No. You're on caboose patrol," Jet says, sweeping past them right to the waiting wagon. "Sneers, I need you to bring me every spare blanket, cloak, cape, jacket, whatever you can beg up."

He almost loses his balance climbing up without hands, but he recovers enough to set her gently on his bedroll. She never let go of the knife—the blade digs into her fingers, and he gingerly extracts it from her grip, winding the cleanest bit of cloth he can find around the cuts. He tucks the cloak under her chin and then steps back.

"I'll be right back."

He finds a skein of water and is trying to figure out the soup when Smellerbee shows up, followed close by some old woman drowning in furs. The snow's getting thick, and they have to stand close to see each other.

"Found her," Smellerbee says, needlessly. "She's not much for listening—"

"But coin's always nice," the midwife cuts in, "and she said you'd provide."

"_After_," Jet says, but waves the silver beneath her nose for demonstration. "There's a woman inside for you."

"How far gone?"

"I dunno," Jet says. "That's part of your job."

With an eye-roll and a sigh, the midwife climbs up into the wagon. Jet doesn't follow—instead standing awkwardly at the canvas flap serving for a door, listening but not looking.

"Alright there, dearie. Let me a look. How many months gone, then?"

"F-four moons, maybe five."

She's shivering bad enough to stutter—more blankets needed and hopefully coming. Jet stalks back to the fire and kicks the log sticking out, coaxing a little more heat. Smellerbee's still around, using some coarse bread to sop up the last dregs of her soup.

"I need you and Longshot on constant watch tonight," he says, dropping down beside her, pulling gloves off with his teeth and struggling with the buckle to his blade sheathes. The metal's cold enough to bite and stick, too cold even to go numb—his fingers burn.

"Yeah, he's taking first," Smellerbee says, refilling her bowl and passing it over. "I'll go up in three hours. Jet, I gotta ask—"

"How's it gonna look to the White Lotus, we show with her corpse?" he snaps, stabbing at the soup with a bent spoon. "She was my contact. She's the one that gave me everything—the maps, the count, the routes. She never once steered me wrong. Never."

"She's Fire Nation, Jet."

"You really still think that matters? After everything?"

"I just don't think you should be so fast to trust."

"What would she even do, laid up like this?"

"I'm just _sayin_'," Smellerbee sighs, pushing to her feet. "I can't blame people for being jumpy."

She starts to walk away, but his hand snaps out and closes over her wrist.

"_Jumpy_ doesn't pull a pregnant woman from a wagon and beat her," he says quietly. "That's not what we are. Not anymore."

That's his final word, and she doesn't challenge it—doesn't get the chance, as the midwife exits the wagon and approaches the fire, rifling through the bag slung beneath her cloak.

"Need water," she grunts, brushing snow aside to kneel. "Mortar and pestle if you can, but I'll take any substitute."

He brings her back a beaten metal bowl filled with fresh snow and two flat stones. She sets the bowl immediately near the fire and works at separating bundles of herbs from her bag.

"So what's wrong with her?"

"Not your trouble, I think," the midwife says. "Unless of course you're to blame for the condition."

"Just a friend," Jet replies, frowning. "What's wrong with her?"

"So far? Bit of belly fever, probably brought on by the cold. These Fire Nation women aren't good for bearing our mountains, or bearing children, for that matter."

"What are you making her, then?"

"Something simple."

"What's in _something simple_?"

"Certainly a lot of questions from you. Sure the bastard isn't yours?"

Jet sets the knife between them, point driven into the log she's leaning against. So happens it's White Lotus's knife—he might laugh, but focuses all his energy into the threat.

"You don't get paid for lying to me."

"Not lying, boy."

"I know what penny-royal looks like," he says in a low growl.

The midwife sits back on her heels, eyeing him carefully.

"Then you should know why a midwife might carry it," she sighs, but all the same, she stows the bundle away and makes a show of the ingredients she intends to use: a mild green tea, lemon balm, lavender, passion flower, each crushed and left to steep for a few minutes. Jet sits back but leaves the knife, just in case.

Up and down what Jet can see of the line, cooking fires have gone out and wagon flaps are being tied closed. The ostrich-horses stamp and snuffle into feedbags, and the snow finally slows down and then stops completely.

"Will she be alright?" Jet asks, kneading his gloves to keep the leather from freezing.

"She will," the midwife confirms, but there's something in the way she says it that gives him pause.

"And the baby?"

She pours the tea into a clean bowl and throws the dregs to the fire.

"I'm sorry," she says softly. "She's in labor pains, and it's too early for that. There's nothing to do but wait. Babe's beyond all but prayer now."

She glances up at the cloud-shielded sky, and then turns and climbs back up into the wagon with the tea. Cold numbs any response Jet can think of—he stands there, mute, until Sneers trundles up under a pile of blankets and furs.

"Everybody's feeling generous tonight," Sneers sighs, always with a smile. "I passed the carpenter—tomorrow morning, he said. It's just gotta sit there, but he says hopefully it won't freeze in the mud."

The midwife's coming back, as Jet takes the blankets and nods at Sneers's excited bouncing.

"Just go to your girl," he sighs, and Sneers practically sprints away.

"I've done what I can," the midwife announces, bag stowed once more beneath her cloak. "The rest is up to her, though I see no harm in begging for Yue's blessing. She might grant it. Keep the girl warm, and off her feet, with plenty of water..."

She trails off, shrugging.

"If there's blood, find me in the morning. We'll know by then."

It takes a bit of maneuvering, but Jet manages to dig out a pair of silver coins and hand them over. The midwife bites down each to be sure, and then, satisfied, turns and walks away into the night.

So he climbs back into the wagon and drops the blankets, taking his time in securing the canvas flaps. The lantern hanging above swings lazily with his motion.

"Still alive?"

"Leave me alone," she says savagely. "Go away."  
The bedroll takes most of the space—she's pushed herself to the very edge, up against the wagon rim, on her side and turned away, face pressed to the pillow. Jet shakes out each blanket and tucks them around her carefully. She's still shivering, still in that torn dress, one hand fisted beneath her chin and the other—the wounded hand—hidden somewhere near her belly.

For a few minutes he complies with her request—the wagon holds no sound but her ragged breathing and stifled whimpers, but soon enough he breaks. Silence is almost worse than stillness.

"So," he says, scooting up beside the pillow, "exactly where were you headed? 'Cause this train stops at Yu Dao, and I hear Fire Nation's not too popular in those parts."

"I'm not Fire Nation anymore," she snarls around a sob. "And I wasn't heading for Yu Dao. I'm meeting someone outside the city."

"Yeah? The Blue Spirit?"

"He's not _real_."

Jet laughs.

"Alright then," he says. "How about the dead Fire Prince who plays him?"

"He's not real either," she whispers, more for herself than him.

"It's true, isn't it?" Jet says—he shouldn't be so surprised, with all those rumors for going on a year now, but the confirmation of it is all in her denial. She glances back at him, enough to see her eyes are red and wet, and then she buries her face away again.

"Not chewing your cud?"

"No grass in winter," Jet laughs. "Not that I'd expect Fire Nation to know that."

"Stop calling me that," she says. "I'm _not_ Fire Nation. Just...call me what you were calling me before."

"Alright, White Lotus. Didn't mean to offend."

"Yes, you did."

"You know I'm going to keep asking until you tell me."

"Your insistence doesn't create within me any sense of obligation."

"What?"

"Do what you want," she sighs. "It makes little difference to me."

The canvas is doing its job well enough—wind buffets the walls but stays outside. Jet peels his gloves off again and works the leather straps of his chest-plate until they're loose enough to pull.

"Alright," he says. "Then I'll work my way to it. You thirsty?"

"_That_'s a detour," she says with a breathy laugh, which must mean _yes_ because when he brings the skein to her lips, she tries to sit up a little and drinks deeply. "Don't offer food. I might throw up on you."

He takes a drink himself and then sets back to work on his armor. Her breathing evens out and slows, but she's still awake, fist clenching rhythmically at the top of the blanket.

"Talking takes your mind off pain, y'know."

"As though _you_ could know this pain."

She takes a few more deep, slow breaths.

"Why are you doing this?" she asks, inhaling sharply.

"Because I never once trusted you."

She glances back to him again, briefly.

"All that time you were my contact, I didn't trust you," Jet continues, shrugging. "Every good piece of information—every map, every count, every route schedule or smuggled manifest—I was always waiting for the knife in my back. You were never anything but honest and good to me, and I never once trusted you."

"Makes you smart, in my books."

"No," Jet says, shaking his head. "Makes me a slave to the rhetoric and blind to the cause."

"The cause?" she repeats.

"Yeah. The _cause_, White Lotus. What we're both fighting for."

"I take it back," she sighs. "You're a moron."

"What?" he laughs. "Why?"

"I have no _cause_," she says bitterly. "I'm not in it for Ba Sing Se or the Avatar or the world or even the thrill of the hunt—something was taken from me, and I can't have it back, so I intend to collect its equal."

She takes another sharp breath, licking her lips.

"Go ahead. Tell me you're different."

"I am," Jet replies quietly. "But I wasn't."

"Now you're going to tell me your tragic story," she sighs with an unkind little half-smile. "You'll talk and get softer and softer until one little tear escapes, and I'll say as expected. _Oh, I'm so sorry. Men shouldn't have to feel things. Let me cry for you._"

"C'mon, it's a _sad_ story," he says with a chuckle, but she's not joking.

"I," she says, letting each word soak up some of the cold, "don't _care_. I'm miscarrying my first child, recently widowed, hundreds of miles from anyone who knows or loves me."

"Don't tell me you're sorry that old fruit's dead."

"He wasn't old. I didn't love him, but he was never cruel to me."

She takes another breath and speaks into the pillow.

"Which is more than I can say for some of the people I _do_ love."

"Like the Blue Spirit?"

She shakes her head with a sigh.

"I suppose your deficit in cunning is made up for by arrogance."

"What?"

"I thought you were _working your way_ to the subject."

"Blunt force can get you pretty far, White Lotus. You should try it sometime."

"No, thank you."

He fumbles for the lantern and blows it out, dropping them into darkness. It's not complete—the wind must have driven the clouds away, because the canvas glows blue with moonlight.

"His name was Zuko," she says softly. "I think I loved him my whole life."

Jet had seen an etching once: an old wanted poster, peeling from the wall of one of those crossroads taverns. Those drawings were never exactly kind or all that accurate—the scar stood out from the parchment in bright red, making it impossible to tell if the eye and ear were missing or just obscured. Maybe that's why he was never found.

"He was banished, disgraced, and they tried to kill him. But he went into the Earth Kingdom and became the Blue Spirit."

"If he's not dead, then what are you fighting for?"

"You don't have to stop breathing to be dead."

"Gettin' too deep for me, White Lotus."

"Keep kicking," she advises as airily as she can. "You'll reach the surface."

The wind is gone by now, and he lowers his voice to match hers, though it's almost certain no one's listening.

"There was this girl," he says, staring into the middle distance. "It must be five years now. Me and my Fighters, living out in the forest, knocking over the occasional cabbage shipment or old man wearing the wrong colors. Thought we were out there on the front lines, fighting the good fight for our burnt homes and our dead families."

"And were you?"

"I thought so. But I turned out wrong."

"In more ways than one, I think."

"Alright, look, it's cold, and I'm not trying to be a creep, but you've got the bedroll and most of the blankets..."

He sets a hand on top, near her shoulder, but waits.

"Were you in love with this girl?" she asks.

"What? No. I don't know."

Jet laughs.

"Maybe a little. It was only a few days that I knew her. I think she liked me. Thought I was cute."

"Until."

"_Until_," he agrees with a sigh.

"Just be quick about it."

"I'll keep a blanket between, I promise."

"And clothes on."

"Of course. What kind of pervert do you think I am?"

"_That_ kind of pervert."

He slides under the blankets as fast and gentle as he can, and she doesn't even wince at the cold. It probably hurts too much to move, so he makes sure to keep a hand's distance between their bodies.

"Tell me about her, then."

"Well, her name's Katara."

"Not an Earth Kingdom name."

"Nope. She's water tribe. A bender."

"And you're so sure she's still alive?"

"You know, I _am_. She had pluck."

"Why is it that men are _brave_ or _resourceful_, but women just have _pluck_?"

"Because you're too delicate to be brave."

She laughs a little.

"And what did you do to her?"

He stares up at the ceiling, chewing his lip in place of straw.

"I couldn't trick her. She saw me for what I really was."

"And what was that?"

"Sorry, White Lotus. You want _that_ story, you gotta hold up your end."

"And I'm just not that interested."

"You know, I met him once. Much as you can meet a guy in a mask."

She doesn't reply.

"I did something. To make that girl hate me. Something I—well, I don't talk about it. After she left, the whole little life I'd built for myself came crumbling down. Fighters started leaving me left and right, and I realized that hiding up in trees and stealing from travelers wasn't exactly the way to end the war."

He calls the memory up and lets it soak through to his bones. High summer, three years ago, another empty graveled patch of empty graveled road leading them slowly onwards to Ba Sing Se. It was an ambush—one he'd been too tired to notice, too sick and confused and angry at himself. The worst of it though was that the thugs were really no different from what the Fighters had always been—knocking over travelers, laughing, claiming allegiance to country and not king.

"He saved us from an ambush. Just came down out of the trees, blades everywhere. I'd never seen someone move like that. After, he didn't stop, didn't say a word. Just sort of nodded and disappeared back into the trees."

"He has that knack. For disappearing."

"How's the pain, White Lotus?"

"It's fine. And my name—"

She takes a slow breath.

"My real name. It's Mai."

"I'm Jet. Nice to meet you."

"And you as well."

Mai sighs and shifts a little, both hands below the blanket now, while Jet shifts opposite, bringing his hands up under his head.

"I was going to marry him," she whispers. "Fall in love, have his children, become the vapid little queen my parents always dreamt of. And now I'm..."

"Sharing a bedroll with a peasant?"

"I suppose I can grateful that you bathe."

"Only when I have to."

They fall asleep, separately—it's hard to tell who goes first, but Jet wakes up a little before dawn and finds Mai still asleep. They both shifted during the night: Jet on his side, facing towards the opposite wall, while Mai turned right over and curls now around his back. He can feel her arms resting against his shoulders.

"Should've asked what kind of pervert _you_ are," he sighs, but doesn't move, fighting down the urge to stretch.

The wind is back, gently batting the canvas walls, and outside Jet can hear the crunch of someone's trudging feet—hopefully the carpenter gone to work with a lantern. The first thready strands of winter morning sunlight are just hitting the wagon's east wall when he feels it.

More than a flutter but less than a thump, right on his spine. It happens again, a little higher, like the dulled tap of a finger, and then he realizes it's not coming from _him_—it's Mai's belly, pressed up against his back.

Pulling in a breath, Jet waits, not even daring to hope, but then it happens again and he jolts up, pushing off the blankets and twisting around. The slice of cold air wakes Mai, who jerks and draws inward.

"What?" she asks, too sleepy to be alarmed.

"Shh," Jet replies, kneeling and pressing his ear to her belly.

"Jet, I don't—"

"Quiet! Let me see if—"

There's no blood, but still he closes his eyes, concentrating, putting a hand over his other ear. Mai seems to be holding her breath, and he pushes away the slow thrum of her pulse, then the quiet gurgle of her stomach and the whistling wind.

And it's there: faint, muted, but steady. Jet reaches up and taps the rhythm on the back of her hand.

She seems too afraid to ask, but as the wagon fills with the soft pink glow of morning, Jet looks up and meets her eyes and smiles.


End file.
